In Larissa Sansour’s film In Vitro (2019), an eco-apocalypse has rendered Bethlehem, Palestine unliveable. Set in the not-so-distant future, the characters have sought refuge underground, their concrete subterranean village keeping them safe from the inhabitable air post-ecocide. Essential to the post-apocalyptic world Sansour has created for this film are glimpses of a past before the ruination – memories of ecological abundance, when juxtaposed with the present’s hollow void, make clear just how much was lost.
In this paper, I use an eco-critical framework to analyze Sansour’s film, examining the ways the characters relate to the new-found ecological scarcity of their world. Putting formal analysis in conversation with data on ecological violence in Palestine and with other visual artists’ works demonstrates the ways that Palestinian artists respond to loss of land and natural landscape following occupation.
The ways that ecocide and occupation go hand in hand in the Palestinian artistic imaginary also means that caring for plants can correspond to anticolonial resistance. In In Vitro, Sansour’s characters have managed to conserve their natural environment and agricultural practices even in the most inhospitable of landscapes. A subterranean garden in the film acts as a utopian expression of Palestinian alternative environmentalism, a concept elaborated by environmental scholar Ghada Sasa.[1] In response to ecological crisis, Palestinian futurism can show us imaginative solutions.
[1] Ghada Sasa, “Oppressive Pines: Uprooting Israeli Green Colonialism and Implanting Palestinian A’wna,” Politics, October 8, 2022.