This feature-length, sci-fi documentary shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. Lyd was once a thriving Palestinian city with a rich history. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Lyd became an Israeli city, and in the process, hundreds of Lyd’s Palestinian residents were massacred by Israeli forces, and most of the city’s 50,000 Palestinian residents were exiled. This film dares to ask the question: what would the city be like had the Israeli occupation of Lyd never happened?

This screening includes a pre-recorded interview between journalist Jonathan Cook and directors Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland.

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict and was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011.

Rami Younis

Rami Younis is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer and journalist from Lyd. Younis is the co-founder and first ever host of news show ‘On the Other Hand’, which exposes fake news and counters misinformation about Palestinian citizens of Israel. Younis was also a 2019-2020 Harvard Divinity School Fellow and worked as a journalist for the online magazine +972 and as the writer and editor of its Hebrew sister site Local Call – a journalistic initiative he co-founded to question Israeli conventional news sources. Furthermore he worked as a parliamentary consultant and media spokesperson for Palestinian Knesset member Haneen Zoabi and is co-founder and manager of the first-ever Palestine Music Expo, which linked the local Palestinian music community to the global industry.

Sarah Ema Friedland

Sarah Ema Friedland is a New York-based documentary filmmaker and media artist. Friedland’s works have screened widely in the US and abroad and have been broadcast nationally on PBS. She received the 2014 Paul Robeson Award from the Newark Museum and was nominated for a New York Emmy. Friedland is the Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College and an active member of the Meerkat Media Collective.