The film opens with a rendering of a flooded archive, where the floor has turned to water, and memories have been made inaccessible—narratives of the past have been lost. Instead, we are bombarded with a montage of historical images that make up a hegemonic understanding of the past. Our perception of truth is manufactured from a selection of very few iconic photographs that weave together a recognizable worldview.
It is in this context that Takriti confronts us with an absence: a pitch-black screen; a non-image of what took place at Damascus Airport on August 29, 1969. That day, the hired photographer forgot to remove the lid from the camera before snapping a picture of what Leila Khaled and Salim Al-Issawi had done: they blew up the commercial aircraft they had hijacked and diverted to Damascus (instead of Tel-Aviv) in an act of protest against the Zionist project. In its place, we see the photograph that made it to the news. Khaled smiles and throws up a symbol of victory at the Damascus Palace of Justice one month after the hijacking, after her release from prison.
Takriti refuses to let absence speak louder than undocumented histories, or the images that we were never allowed to see. Superimposing text and image over the official picture, the artist disrupts the systems of meaning creation to insist on the significance of what the photograph does not contain—inserting the erased backstory into the image. Footage of Khaled emerges from the middle of the screen, blocking her face in the initial picture. She shoots towards the sky, echoing her triumph in August 1969. Here, physical resistance parallels symbolic resistance. Like Khaled, Takriti refuses erasure and creates an alternative.
There is no going back from the moment of revelation. Footage of the moon and its eclipse—images of space—confront us with a nothingness now filled with meaning that is only waiting to be uncovered. From what seems like an empty crater emerges a black liquid, signaling what is to come. Once the lid is open, the unspoken histories of resistance cannot be stopped from seeping into our world. Refusing to Meet Your Eye thus looks towards a future where suppressed histories cannot be subdued, and where interrogating absence is part of the struggle.
