Under file entry Z32, the testimony of a former elite soldier of the Israeli army is preserved. He confesses to having participated in the killing of Palestinians. Was it a breach of duty resulting from high spirits, collateral damage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the self-fulfilling prophecy of every military training? Avi Mograbi uses the testimony and his own disturbance as an occasion to re-interrogate the confessor who is made anonymous by image manipulation. He calls his cross examination a “documentary musical tragedy”, because he sings his comments right into the experimental interrogation room: “Oy, I’m harbouring a murderer, oy, inside my film.”

“Zaho Zay!”, it’s me. This is the daily salute of the prisoners in a crowded Madagascan prison whose guard looks for her lost father in each new prisoner. Her projections and fantasies let the mystical, murderous father figure roam the island in simultaneously dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, accompanied by a poetic voiceover. A hybrid narrative, speculating about the mysterious paths and profound traumas of its landscapes and all who walk in them.

A pair of dice, a quiet murderer and his victims, traces of history and magic realism. Rituals and riddles, revenge, remorse and imprisonment are unravelled and re-interlaced between the brutal reality of a detention centre, the fantasies of the fictionalised narrator and the vast natural spaces of an island – slowly and poetically. Crises, colonial violence and its continuities are suggested and condensed. The montage of documentary material and staged sequences references western and film noir and develops an intense visual and narrative pull. An almost lyrical text and the precisely framed images bear witness to an impossible quest that’s actually a haunting, referring to individual and collective traumas and the strange forces with which such shocks inscribe themselves into narratives and places.