Who are our neighbors?

The other?

How fast do I decide I already know?

The discomfort came from realizing how fast I thought I already knew what I was seeing, and how invested I was in not slowing that certainty down. Not outrage, not certainty, but a quiet angst that my interpretations were arriving ahead of the encounter itself.

Each time these questions surfaced, they exposed a gap between what I believed I understood and how often I was speaking over, rather than with, the people closest to me.

Living and working in Israel as an immigrant, studying alongside much younger peers, that gap felt especially charged.

Here, almost everyone carries some version of having been misrepresented or mistranslated. Under that pressure, looking becomes volatile. Attention slips into assumption. At some point, care began to resemble entitlement, and I didn’t always recognize when that shift happened.

I started to notice how the desire to connect can quietly turn into the desire to claim. To narrate another person’s life in order to steady my own sense of goodness. The camera, which I once trusted as a neutral tool, lingered. It selected. It imposed duration.

And I was the one holding it. 

These questions followed me from the classroom into practice. As I researched, scouted, rehearsed, filmed, and edited my graduation film, the distance between intention and effect became harder to ignore. Each attempt to explain the project made that gap more visible.

What I thought I was doing and what the image was actually producing were no longer aligned.

This essay begins from a realization I wish were not true. Good intentions do not protect us from harm. In cinema they can accelerate it.

Projection moves fastest when it feels like care.

Looking as Inheritance

I began to understand that representation is never only about what is shown, but about who gets to look without consequence, especially when that looking believes itself to be benevolent. 

I started to feel that long before cinema became an art form, the camera learned how to sort the world for us. It emerged alongside the empire not as a passive witness, but as a way of organizing difference. To point a lens was not simply to record. It was to claim authority over what I was seeing.

This history does not disappear. It lingers in habits of framing, in the expectation that certain places will offer meaning, drama, or suffering on demand.

I kept telling myself that looking should come before projection. In practice, it almost never did. Projection arrived first, fast and confident, and I often mistook it for care, especially when that care aligned with how I wanted to see myself.

What unsettles me is how easily my own good intentions slid into this inheritance, often before I noticed the shift. The desire to understand, to empathize, even to do better, often arrives already shaped by fantasy. The camera holds longer than politeness allows.

It asks for coherence where none is owed.

Duration itself becomes pressure, especially when I’m the one deciding how long to look.

What draws me to filmmakers like Elia Suleiman, Nadine Labaki, Shirin Neshat, and Trinh T. Minh Ha is not that they offer corrected images, but that they interrupt the conditions of looking. The silence blocks projection.

It refuses my urge to translate.

What becomes visible is simple and difficult. The gaze is never neutral, though I still catch myself wanting it to be. It always carries history, hierarchy, and my wish to be innocent. To resist that history does not mean claiming innocence.

It means staying with the fragility of seeing longer than comfort allows.

Elia Suleiman, Divine Intervention

Checkpoint car scene

This scene refuses emotional guidance. The viewer is not told how to feel, where to look, or what resolution to expect. Instead of being moved, the viewer is held in suspension.

Suleiman sits motionless in a parked car at a military checkpoint. Israeli soldiers move in and out of the frame. There is no dialogue. No escalation. No articulated threat. The car does not move. Suleiman does not react. 

The camera is static and frontal. Authority is visible but never emphasized. Soldiers enter the frame but do not dominate it. The shot lasts longer than narrative logic requires. Waiting becomes the primary action. Silence offers no emotional cues. The rhythm is bureaucratic and repetitive.

Structurally, nothing builds and nothing releases.

What Suleiman forces the viewer to experience is power as inertia rather than violence. Domination operates here through repetition and suspended movement, not spectacle, and I realized how unprepared I was to recognize power when it refused drama.

The checkpoint is not a crisis but a condition.

The viewer is made to endure that condition alongside the character, without catharsis or moral clarity. The scene does not ask for empathy. It asks for patience, and I wanted the scene to declare its politics so I could agree with it, rather than sit inside what it was showing me about my own expectations. 

I’m not sure the camera stopped possessing reality, but it did stop comforting me. I wasn’t prepared for what became visible, felt closer to the violence embedded in looking itself.

Nadine Labaki, Capernaum

Courtroom testimony scene

This scene repositions the viewer from witness to listener. Zain, a young boy, stands in a courtroom and sues his parents for bringing him into the world.

Adults speak around him, but the camera repeatedly returns to his face as he addresses the judge. He does not cry. He does not perform gratitude. He speaks simply.

The courtroom listens.

The framing is tight and at eye level. Reaction shots are minimal. Zain is not observed from above or reduced by distance. The duration allows his speech to unfold without interruption. Silence appears between lines, procedural rather than emotional. There is no music.

The rhythm belongs to the institution, not to melodrama.

Structurally, his claim remains unresolved. What Labaki forces the viewer to experience is agency without rescue. The close up does not aestheticize suffering. It transfers responsibility. The viewer is not invited to feel for Zain, but to confront the systems that require a child to justify his existence in legal terms. The camera does not redeem his pain, it felt like listening.

In doing so, the film refuses the viewer’s easy feeling of having cared.

Trinh T. Minh Ha, Reassemblage

Senegalese daily labor sequence

This scene withdraws mastery. Women perform everyday tasks. The camera isolates gestures, fabric, movement. Faces are partial or absent. Images do not accumulate into explanation. Voice and image do not align.

Nothing is contextualized.

Nothing resolves.

The framing fragments bodies into textures. Duration registers labor without stabilizing meaning. Silence resists translation. Rhythm blocks immersion. There is no narrative arc, no causal sequence, no hierarchy of images.

I find myself looking without possession. The promise that observation leads to understanding collapses. Meaning remains incomplete and adjacent. The viewer cannot master what they see or leave with closure.

Looking becomes labor, or it should. Responsibility replaces comprehension. The film does not teach us about Senegalese women.

Trinh T. Minh Ha teaches us about the violence of wanting to know.

When the Gaze Looks Back

This question became unavoidable while working on my own film. Each stage of production revealed how closely my intentions mirrored the tensions I was examining. What troubled me was how familiar this structure felt.

The desire to connect slid easily into the desire to define.

I did not fully understand this until the film itself refused to cooperate, and I had no clean way to explain that refusal to myself. What unsettled me most was not that I misread, but how much I wanted my care to count as proof that I could not be doing harm.

Scene 9 is the center of the film. Maryam arrives at Lima’s home in Abu Gosh to return a wallet. She expects recognition.

I had imagined a different landscape. One that performed conflict. Abu Gosh did not. Just before filming, Adan, the actress playing Lima, questioned the logic of the scene. At first, I heard it as a problem to solve.

Only later did I understand that Adan’s refusal was ethical.

We paused. I listened without understanding the language. The image no longer needed my interpretation. When we filmed, Lima did not absorb Maryam’s fantasy. She asked her to leave. Calmly.

Without theatrics.

This is where the narrative turns. The viewer sees the cost of looking without listening. Scene 9 is not only where Maryam learns this. It is where the film does.

When Intention Fails

What stayed with me was not an answer, but a pause. A moment when the image stopped confirming what I thought I already knew. When it no longer moved smoothly toward meaning, or toward me. That hesitation felt familiar.

It was the same unease that first drew me into this work, the sense that my interpretations were arriving too quickly, ahead of the encounter itself.

I am left unsure whether restraint is enough. I don’t yet know whether staying is an ethical limit, or the first real responsibility, or whether I’m still learning how easily staying can become another form of control. I only know that leaving too quickly has started to feel like a form of harm I recognize.

Cinema exposes how looking works.

It can make space for refusal. But it cannot guarantee humility. It cannot promise that attention will not slip back into entitlement.

What this film risks is not confusion, but incompleteness. It risks withholding comfort. It risks allowing the person on screen to remain partially unknowable. It risks staying longer than resolution allows.

I do not know if this is sufficient. I only know that when the image pretends to understand too much, something essential disappears.

I began this work asking who our neighbors are, and how quickly our answers settle. I end it still unsure how to remain once the image no longer flatters my intentions.

Whether staying interrupts projection or just slows it down is the question I am still living with.