Samira Eskandarfar, The Olive, 2009. Sound, 07:40

A silent conversation is relayed in a male voice between two girls as they sit across each other at the table under a painting of an olive branch. They eat olives. When the painting is removed, it leaves its “ghost” mark on the wall; the girls, too, are like ghosts of their grandmothers, as they enumerate their lost children and those yet to be born. A glimpse of the grandmother herself brings back a “desperate vitality” that her granddaughters lack. Circular time of the film points to an abhorrent simultaneity between nourishment and withering, desire and dread, love and death.