Uriel Orlow, Yellow Limbo, 2011, 14:00

The film looks back at the extraordinary historical episode — the stalled passage of fourteen international cargo ships through the Suez Canal on June 5, 1967. Caught in the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the ships were only able to leave the Canal in 1975 when it reopened. During the eight years that the ships and their multi-national crews were stranded, the Cold War political allegiances gave way to communal life in this unique though temporary heterotopic society — it even organized its own Olympic games in 1968, amongst other activities. The video combines home movies and photographs by crewmembers with artist’s recent footage on location, interlaced with text and sound. Multiple layers create a dissociation from causality of events, and render currents that flow back-and-forth in between the past and the present.