Still Playing

After studying political science and film history, Mohamed Mesbah graduated from CinéFabrique as an editor in 2018. Still Playing, his first film, had its world première in Locarno. 

A word from the selection committee : 
“But who is attacking us exactly? I don’t understand.” In a series of videos posted on Youtube between 2017 and 2020, streamers test and comment live on the video games Layla and the Shadows of War (2014), which depicts a young girl’s experience of war in Palestine. A few years later, in the West Bank (summer 2024), Mohamed films Rasheed (the creator of the game) and his two sons as they navigate their daily routine of war and occupation – a reality in which every landscape, every silence, and every body is inevitably imbued with the ghosts of memory and the lingering fear of violence suddenly erupting. On Rasheed’s computer, footage of the genocide streams from Gaza; outside, the threat of Israeli army raids is everywhere. How can one continue to live a normal life, to see one’s children grow, in the face of such horror? Rasheed finds momentary refuge in creating and designing his video games: “You can understand a machine, but you can’t understand a human being”, he says. As if there were something comforting about computers – where everything can be controlled, calculated, explained, and fixed –, playing becomes an act of resistance. And a single line of code entered by Rasheed into his software reveals the poetic equation of the film, a line of flight through a devastated landscape:"{else} // Keep moving" — Still Playing.

Rose Hirgorom