Unmade Film is an impossible film, fragmented into its constituent parts; an expansive collection of audio-visual works that point to the structure of a film but never fully become one. Unmade Film takes as its starting point the mental hospital Kfar Shau’l in Jerusalem. Initially specialising in the treatment of Holocaust victims–including a relative of the artist–it was established in 1951 using the remains of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin which was depopulated in a massacre by Zionist paramilitaries in April 1948.

“Upon the horrific realization that Kfar Sha’ul is in fact Deir Yassin, Orlow set out on a journey to probe the meaning of one painful event in history obliterating the other, in a context of historical intimacy between both… Orlow’s Unmade Film reconstructs a narrative of space, time and historical blind-spots that adds layers of unsettled new meaning to questions of subconscious pain, trauma and suffering in the contexts of obliterated geo-histories.”
– Hanan Toukan

Unmade Film was developed through long-term research and collaborative workshops with actors, musicians and teenagers in East Jerusalem and Ramallah; the resulting work combines sound, drawing, video, music and photography.