Traces in the Rock of Elsewhere (2000)

• 80%
• 2000
• Majdi El-Omari

Salma and Pierre live in a suburb of Montreal. The morning progresses in habitual movements and routines which speak of a life moving along seemingly harmonious patterns. Pierre brings in the mail. Salma has received a letter from Palestine, the homeland she left 20 years ago and from which she has not received any news for the past 15 years. Salma takes the letter, looks at it, turns it over, and touches it, trying to feel its texture. As they drive to work in the city, she is hardly aware of Pierre's presence; she is elsewhere that is, until the prying eyes of a passing car driver jolt her into returning to where she has taken off from. All through the day, Salma will be brutally returned to the reality of place and time by the eyes, voices and sounds she feels are trying to pierce through the bubble that with the arrival of the letter has formed around her. a colleague's question at work, a gust of wind from a window opening suddenly, the eyes of a Native American statuette in a shop window, the crash of another shop window, footsteps and moving colors. A tension builds up in the bubble, culminating in Salma's seeing someone whom she believed to have died in Lebanon. It is late in the day when she hears chanting in Arabic, looks for its source and finds it is a choir rehearsing in a church. She turns to leave, sees an offerings candle rack and stops. She starts lighting candles, quietly standing there, elsewhere...