The Land That Remains

Commissioned by UNESCO, Federico Busonero undertook three extensive journeys through the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territory between 2008 and 2009. Using a traditional film camera and unmistakably, his heart, he created pictures that illustrate culturally important, rarely seen places in the topography of the Mashriq—the Arabic “places of sunrise” to the east of the Nile—villages and cities with extraordinary heritage, pastoral rolling hills and ancient olive groves, fertile wadi ecologies, sacred desert cemeteries, and vanishing millennial archaeological sites. A critical yet neutral gaze sheds light on the impending loss of Palestine’s cultural legacy with images of today’s broken history being occupied forcefully by another’s reality, reflecting visions of hope sacrificed in the land that remains.