“Ayooni” (“my eyes” in Arabic) is a movie that invites It’s viewers on a journey along the separation wall. A camera rolls by the fence in a horizontal movement, tracing after strips of posters hung on the wall in Arab villages and neighborhoods in the vicinity of East Jerusalem. Printed on the posters are words of love in three languages, side by side with images taken from old Arabic movies. The editing work relates to the separation wall as a reel of 35mm film and compares the movement along the wall to the movement of the feed wheel in a movie projector. Advanced computer manipulations based on the physical construction of the wall were used to weld the slabs of the fence to each other and enable smooth movement along the length and width of the fence. Accelerating the movement works the wall like a zoetrope, an analogical instrument used for animation of frozen pictures by creating an illusion of movement, and this animates the posters hung on the wall. With the animation, the concrete is transformed into old film, which awakens the images appearing on the poster: the beautiful eyes of the Lebanese Miss Universe (1971) Georgina Rizk and the silhouettes of the famous Egyptian singer, Abdel Halim Hafez.

The work is accompanied by an original soundtrack based on the song ‘Nebtidi Mini Al Hikaya‘ (‘let’s start from the beginning’) which was performed by Abd El Halim Hafez and composed by Mohammed Abd El Wahab, two of the most important musicians of the Arab world in the previous century. The tune, which was later used also as the base of an Israeli hit “your brown eyes“, was adapted and re-edited in relation to the tempo of the moving pictures in the film.