Abstraction Belongs To Us (Short) | BFI Flare 2026
Palestinian voices and perspectives echo on the capital streets of liberal democracies that ignore them.
Here at OBSCURAE, we've always championed short storytelling as the hunting ground for your next favourite filmmaker – and encouraged you not to skip the shorts programme! Welcome back to our Short Film Review Series, Sweet and Short.
Abstraction Belongs to Us is a synthesis of many ideas, six interviewees, three actors, three voice actors, and a flurry of images of London and Paris. Despite the volume of information, each kernel of knowledge feels valuable, and that makes this film one I'll definitely revisit after Flare.
Rather than rely on a single thread to guide the audience through it, director Gabi Sahar and editor Mateo Villanueva Brandt invite the viewer into a web of interconnected musings on the Palestinian experience. Visually, the film feels like a puzzle that's in the process of being solved, but a solution seems elusive. The occasional editing tricks, like colour inversion, keep things interesting and slightly off-kilter.
Throughout the film, the voice-overs touch on themes of isolation, objectification, fetishisation, and the struggle for Palestinians to define themselves in a world that has carefully managed its willingness to protect, support, or even perceive the state and people of Palestine.
The fact that Abstraction Belongs To Us was filmed exclusively in London and Paris sometimes felt like a pointed thing – a callout of the inaction of Western liberal democracies that have more or less sat by as Palestine has been reduced to rubble over the past couple of years. It's genuinely hard to watch people sip coffee and saunter about in the sun as the words of diasporic Palestinians play over the top.
But the worst part is that the filming took place in London and Paris because those are places where Palestinians have fled to in order to escape the genocide, and the actors are there to protect those people. Still, the setting does a lot to ground the viewer in a familiar context – these are not people in some distant land, they're here with us.
As a means to present Palestinian voices, Abstraction Belongs to Us achieves its goal; it's up to us how closely we listen.
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