The Dust She Kisses Press contact

Press kit

The Dust
She Kisses

The Realm · The Morisca · Deyr Yasin

A trilogy by Seif Abdalla. These three films go where the archive is silent.

Press & festival enquiries

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Email
I.

The Realm

Runtime
3:30
Format
Black & White
Director
Seif Abdalla
Original score
Adnan Joubran
Distribution
MK2 Films
Watch
vimeo.com/1124444270

Those who search for the disappeared become disappeared themselves.

Synopsis

When the regime falls, a daughter comes home from exile to look for the father who told her to leave. She walks through the regime’s abandoned prisons with other families of the disappeared, all of them seeking answers and seeking peace.

Then the search gives way. The ruins open onto the Realm, a city outside time where the vanished wait. She finds her father there as a boy in a black uniform who doesn’t remember the man he grew into. She finds herself there too, veiled and only half present, a ghost among ghosts.

The film unfolds as one unbroken shot between the world and what lies beneath it. The Realm is about the second disappearance, the one that happens to the people left behind searching.

The making

Built from more than 450 generated frames joined into a single continuous shot.

The Realm — still 1 The Realm — still 2 The Realm — still 3 The Realm — still 4 The Realm — still 5 The Realm — still 6 The Realm — still 7 The Realm — still 8
Download stills (.zip)
II.

The Morisca

الموريسكية

Runtime
8:33
Format
Black & White
Director
Seif Abdalla
Produced by
Munir Abbar
Sound design
Richard Blaha
Awards
Winner, Best Narrative Short — Rome AI Festival
Winner, Best Documentary and Art Direction — AI International Film Festival
Watch
vimeo.com/seifeldin/moriscafilm

A faith that survives by becoming a song.

Synopsis

Spain, after the Alpujarras revolt. She was ten when it drowned in blood. Her parents were buried beneath their olive trees, and the children were taken, baptised, separated and renamed. Her brother was lost among them.

Now she travels the land with nothing but her oud, which is all the great women before her left behind, searching for the brother she was torn from. She speaks to him throughout the film, in the language of Sufi poetry, the way the poets speak of Joseph fallen like the moon into the well. They call her the Morisca. People look at her with suspicion, because in this country it’s a crime to speak aloud what the heart carries. So she plays. In public she’s a wandering musician. In the music she’s something else.

The film moves in chapters, through narrated poetry and the sound of the oud. The Morisca follows a faith that survives by going underground, into melody, into the body, into the space between notes. Drawing on Sufi and Andalusi thought, it asks what’s left of a people when their prayer can only be sung in disguise.

The making

Rebuilt post-Reconquest Spain at a scale no independent production could afford.

The Morisca — still 1 The Morisca — still 2 The Morisca — still 3 The Morisca — still 4 The Morisca — still 5 The Morisca — still 6 The Morisca — still 7 The Morisca — still 8
Download stills (.zip)
III.

Deyr Yasin

دير ياسين

Runtime
3:35
Format
Black & White
Director
Seif Abdalla
Music
Azam Ali & Loga Ramin Torkian
Watch
vimeo.com/seifeldin/deyryasin

“I did not choose your name, Zahra. You chose it.”

Synopsis

On April 9, 1948, Zionist militias entered Deyr Yasin, a village west of Jerusalem, and killed more than a hundred of its people. Maryam was fourteen, and she survived.

Years later, by the sea, Maryam speaks to her daughter Zahra, and also to the village itself. For a long time she couldn’t bring herself to say its name. Now she says it: O Deyr Yasin, you were my home. She tells Zahra where her own name comes from. On the morning everything ended, as they were being taken away, Maryam saw a flower beside a dead man’s hand, pushing its way out of the earth. Zahra. The flower. She remembered the name and carried it for years, long before she met Zahra’s father and long before her daughter was born.

The film is a letter in images. Voice and picture move between the morning of the massacre and the quiet of a life rebuilt by the water. Deyr Yasin is about what a mother can still give after everything has been taken: a name, which is an inheritance no one can confiscate.

The making

Shaped to the grain of Kodak Double-X, the film stock of the era it remembers.

Deyr Yasin — still 1 Deyr Yasin — still 2 Deyr Yasin — still 3 Deyr Yasin — still 4 Deyr Yasin — still 5 Deyr Yasin — still 6 Deyr Yasin — still 7 Deyr Yasin — still 8
Download stills (.zip)

The subtitles burned into the film read “Deir Yassin”; the trilogy uses the spelling “Deyr Yasin” throughout.

About the trilogy

Three forms
of remembering

One woman, three centuries. She’s a daughter coming home from exile to look for her father. She’s a musician who hides her faith in the silence between the strings. She’s a mother handing her daughter a name. The histories change around her, but her face doesn’t. She’s the witness.

Each film uses AI image and video generation as its primary medium. That choice comes from the subject, not novelty: the medium can reach places the historical archive can’t. These films make images where the archive has none. They aren’t reconstructions. They’re acts of remembrance.

Director

Seif
Abdalla

Seif Abdalla is a director and cinematographer based in New York. His work spans documentary for National Geographic and Vice and commercial work for GQ, Vogue, Lancôme and Adidas. His debut feature documentary screened in Cairo, Málaga, Amman and Vienna.

His AI films include The Realm, distributed by MK2 Films; The Morisca, winner of Best Narrative Short at the Rome AI Festival and Best Documentary and Art Direction at the AI International Film Festival; Hanaa, commissioned by Runway; and Deyr Yasin. His work draws on Palestinian history and literature, Sufi thought, and the contemplative cinema of Tarkovsky, Tarr and Bresson.