Selfish Road, 2022
Selfish Road (completed in November 2022)
A 30-minute film by artist and filmmaker Oreet Ashery.
Journeying through their homeland and recalling autobiographical memories along the way, Ashery observes how both senses of belonging have and continue to fuse with the vertiginous and winding flows of nation-building, infrastructure and land use.
Turning a camera onto the contested land in and around Jerusalem, Selfish Road draws upon the genres of science-fiction, stand-up comedy, the family photo album, and the implicit privilege of the slacker road movie. The film reveals a composite portrait of a rapidly changing landscape: roads collapse into sinkholes, diseased cacti line highways, and location-monitoring apps map circuitous routes to flag “high risk” and “prohibited” areas. This episodic reflection of space and place attempts to work through the paradox: How can you own something that is stolen?
Selfish Road depicts a contradictory environment of industrial extraction obscured by spiritual wellness practices. With anger, grief, hope, and resistance, it dreams of material ecological visions for indigenous life away from settler occupation and seeks out an ethics in and beyond the beauty of the region.
Commissioned by A KW Production Series. Text by Mason Lever-Yap
Selfish Road has been screened in:
European Media Art Festival, EMAF, Osnabrück, April 2023
Alchemy Film Festival, Scotland, April 2023
Stroud Film Festival, March 2023
The Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, march 2023
Ruins festival, British Association for the Study of Religions, The University of Edinburgh, September 2021
Braziers Film Festival, 2023, Social Spaces
Essen im Sande, 7th July, 2023, screening and Q&A with Jumana Manna’s Foragers. Invited by curator Suza Husse at the Agriculture School and the farming collective Lawine at Neuendorf im Sande
The Rencontres Internationales Paris Berlin festival
Selfish Road was screened in various talks in art schools and other educational and activists events and contexts. It is available for screenings by request from the artist.