This is an attempt to juxtapose two sequences from two films produced around the same period in 1981 but set in different geographies. Both present a relationship with land that resists settler colonialism, thereby redefining fixed property relations. In both scenes, the body is central to the refusal of the land dispossession, whether through an active reappropriation or a refusal to sell, swap, or enter into a transactional relation that would lead to the symbolic loss of the land.

In one sequence, we watch a body throw itself to the ground and trespass the barb-wired property, while in the other, the main protagonist stands still in the middle of the field, refusing to sell or exchange property.


“No” to Land Swap

In Fertile Memory by Michel Khleifi, one of the female protagonists, Romia, is a widowed mother in Nazareth who has been working all her life doing different jobs to feed her two children and take care of their upbringing. Since their land was expropriated – despite them holding a title deed issued by the Ottoman land registration office – the Israeli authorities classified it as unusable and therefore uncultivable. This situation turned the mother, who was a fellaha, a land worker, into an uprooted laborer in a swimsuit factory.

The scenes of her riding a bus to her workplace while looking at the landscape from the window show the separation, the distance, and the alienation that is created by the formation of the state of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinian natives. Romia looks at the fields that she no longer has access to. Her son insists on exchanging their plot for land that was also expropriated from an absentee owner (meaning someone expulsed since the Nakba in 1948, which is still ongoing). She refuses categorically, even though she is prohibited from working it. In a second scene, where she visits the plot for the first time in thirty years, we see her standing in the middle of the fields and outright rejecting her son’s idea to exchange the land. There is no material benefit to her “no.” There is nothing pragmatic about it. All there is, is a memory, an affect, a transmission of the “no” itself in affirmation of a relation to the land. As if the rift between the land and the dispossessed person was mended by the “no” that stands as a categorical refusal against a settler colonial state and its legal system.

The bus window that we look past and that produces the traveling shot of the land is an alienating point of view that reveals the impossibility of being close to the land. It is an asphyxiating frame for the landscape itself, for the dispossessed traveler, and for us viewers. Watching through the window and from the point of view of the dispossessed person produces an image of double alienation; on the one hand, the alienated person watching their own alienation, and on the other hand, the unreachable land. It is as if the scene with Romia standing in the middle of her plot of land and saying “no” to the land exchange in a fixed shot was a refusal of the traveling shot, the movement, and the transaction of land. It becomes her only way to resist this theft. Standing still, standing fast, saying “no” to her son who wants to move on, forget, and through that, saying “no” to the state that wants to erase her and her relationship to the land. 
Colonialism is inherently linked to a capitalist system of production that requires territorial expansion. Therefore, land grabbing, privatization, commodification, financialization, and their flow are essential processes for establishing a settler colonial state that Romia refutes with her “no.” Her very presence on the land cracks the state narrative and capital’s flux at once.

In ‘Representing Palestinian Dispossession: Land, Property and Photography in the Settler Colony,’ Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano quote from ‘Interiors,’ a text in which Edward Said writes about the film:

“‘The film unobtrusively registers the fact that she is there on her land, which is also there; as for the circumstances intervening between these two facts, we remember the useless title deed and Israeli possession, neither of which is actually visible. Immediately then we realize that what we see on the screen, or in any picture representing the solidity of Palestinians in the interior, is only that, a utopian image making possible a connection between Palestinian individuals and Palestinian land.’
These utopian moments create a space for imagining how life, how the confines of property relations in and beyond the settler colony could be otherwise. The condition for such imaginings, and for not allowing them to slip into the false comforts of nationalist ideology (of which Said was an insistent critic), is a nuanced exploration of the politics and practice of representation.” (Bhandar and Toscano 2017, 9–10)

Indeed, the crack that Romia’s refusal performs opens two channels; one that makes visible the title deed and its erasure by the Israeli authorities, and another that reveals a possible future in which the land is returned and the property relation is not mediated by the settler-colonial legal apparatus.


Image Seed



The camera travels and follows bodies as they are taking over the land, breaking the barricades and the metal wires that delineate private property. As the property’s framing is being dismantled, it is as if the frame of the image itself was shaken. Landless peasants (campesinos) lead us through that new space of non-property, against and despite a legal state apparatus proclaiming that the hacienda belongs to the big landowners.

Wide-shot scenes of protests and land reclamation are intercut with close-ups of seeds and tree trunks. A hand is planting the seed. A close-up shot of a hole in the tree trunk. A voiceover layers the close-up of the seed. These close-ups, juxtaposed with the mass takeover of land, open a new horizon: one of a utopia built through the images of holes in trees and seeds in the ground. The hole in the close-up shot of the tree becomes the possible germinal of a new political horizon. The sowing of seeds is the sowing of a new political project that centers on communal ownership and collective land maintenance. It is as if every close-up on an organically shaped matter opens to millions of political possibilities. With the re-appropriation of the land, we find ourselves within a new political vision that does not eliminate the hole formed by the colonial act of dispossession. The hole represents what was replaced by the private property regime, and which in turn produced its resistance: the campesinos’ project of communal property.

Nuestra Voz de Tierra, Memoria y Futuro is a 1981 film by Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva in the Cauca region of southwest Colombia. They had followed the first years of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), which was founded in 1971 to represent the interests of the region’s Indigenous people, and joined the struggle of the Andean campesinos and Indigenous as filmmakers. In an interview published in 2019, Rodríguez says:

“We’ve always been attracted to subjects or territories of conflict and injustice, so it felt like a natural progression to make a film on the indigenous cause. We settled on the Coconuco because the first land reclamations were happening there. As Jorge used to say, we were filming a political process from submission to organization. In the ‘60s and ‘70s in Colombia, the indigenous peoples realized that if they did not organize, they would be exterminated, so the film quickly became focused on these land reclamations and the political, collective alternatives that these cultures provided moving forward into the future.”

The film is partly staged, depicting a myth about the white landowner, and partly follows the land recuperation process and organizing. The colonizer’s position is staged; it seems fixed and old with all its crucifixes and icons. We see footage of archbishops parading with the cross juxtaposed with the urgency and dynamism of the footage of the campesinos and Indigenous population of the Cauca. Toppling the fixity of the delineated land, their agricultural tools become like weapons: that is, weapons of survival. We hear the chants of protesters interwoven with music and a rhythmic montage built on the sound of the agricultural tools being sharpened. We see their resistance to working on haciendas as they march en masse, with their tools in their hands.