The Diary of a Sky

A video essay by artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan examining the militarization of the airspace over Beirut. Through a diaristic collage of cell phone images, UN-documented sounds and reflective narration, the film exposes the omnipresence of Israeli military overflights. What might seem like background noise is revealed as a mechanism of domination, transforming the atmosphere into a sonic battlefield where drones and fighter-jets fly so low and so fast that they sometimes break the sound barrier by shattering windows, while at other times they leave their noise floating in the atmosphere, not loud enough to terrify, but frequent enough to fuel near-constant fear. Hamdan interweaves these records with historical references, from post-war Germany to Gaza in 2021, revealing a landscape of aerial violence that persists over time. (RS)