The film envisions Alexandria’s gradual submergence beneath rising seas – a mythic future not far from reality, as sections of the city are already underwater, with projections foretelling further submersion. Alexandria’s ancient cisterns, of which only twenty have endured out of hundreds once documented, serve as symbols of resistance against a vanishing past, as echoes of forgotten floods and lives long gone rise from silence.

The voice over features excerpts from the memoirs of Arwa Saleh, a prominent Egyptian female activist in the radical student movement in the 1970s. The film considers the intersections between memory and ecology, positing demolished sites as sites of memory that can, through collective remembrance, gesture us towards alternative futures.

laws of Ruins,

14 min, 4k Film, 2024

photo by Eva Carasol