缅北禁地

Nadir Mauge is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker based in Bethlehem. Working in film and photography for over a decade, his practice documents the shifting realities of Palestinian life and the broader societies around him, drawing deeply from personal experiences to interrogate questions of memory, belonging, and identity. His award-winning works have been exhibited internationally at festivals, galleries, and cultural institutions.

Nadir works across both analog and digital forms, maintaining a traditional darkroom where he produces hand-crafted silver gelatin prints. Trained under assistants of Ansel Adams, he developed a rigorous technical foundation that informs the precision and material depth of his photographic practice. Alongside still photography, he creates documentary and experimental films that reflect a critical, often poetic engagement with place, politics, and personal history.

His most recent film project, My Tomb, Our Tomb & Rachel’s Tomb, explores contested memory and sacred spaces in Bethlehem and is currently being prepared for international festival circulation. Earlier works have examined themes of exile, fragmentation, and the lived impact of borders on Palestinian communities.

Engaged in both practice and theory, Nadir’s work resists neat categorization, moving between visual art, documentary, and social inquiry. His images and films form a personal yet collective archive, foregrounding the intersection of individual narrative with wider historical and cultural struggles.

'In my Room' delves into the theme of 'waiting' within the Palestinian condition under Israeli colonialism. As a filmmaker from Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, I confront an uncertain future amidst the ongoing war on Palestine. With my family business closed and our home near Checkpoint 300 under regular curfew, life feels frozen, leaving me and millions of Palestinians waiting in uncertainty. As violence escalates, I retreat to my room, feeling imprisoned as options narrow. The resulting feature-length documentary explores waiting and the quest for physical and psychological escape, particularly for the post-Oslo generation – the future leaders of Palestine. Set in my room, amidst security infrastructures, the film reflects on 'spacio-cide' or 'urbi-cide’ (see Griffiths and Repo 2019; 2021; Rijke and Minca 2019), the de-development of contested areas under Israeli control (see also Abujidi 2014; Hanafi 2009), and the uncertain or looming futures amid political oppression (Joronen and Griffiths 2019). This occupation slows economic activity, restricts movement, and shrinks Palestinian spaces (see e.g., Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014). Alongside this spatial control, time is prolonged as many Palestinians are made to wait: for checkpoints, permits, crisis resolution – a better future (see Griffiths 2017). 'In my Room' engages with academic literature on space, time, and everyday life in Palestine, contributing to cultural and social scientific scholarship on geopolitics and filmic form. The research will interrogate the complexities of waiting and resilience, amplifying voices that are often silenced in conflict.