Nation Estate

The film opens with a woman arriving at a busy train station, clutching her travel bag as she glides up an escalator toward the security gates. Biometric checks admit her into a quiet lobby, creating a calm counterpoint to the surrounding urgency. The moment subtly frames movement through controlled spaces as the first step of her journey.

At the top of the escalator, a wall poster—Nation Estate: Living the High Life—draws Leila Sansour’s attention, a stark contrast to the rapid pace around her. The elevator interior is alive with screens flashing ads about water scarcity, food access, and travel restrictions. These signals foreshadow the pressures that frame her journey.

The elevator’s wall map designates the first stop as the 13th floor, Jerusalem. As two other travelers step off, the doors open to reveal a glimpse of the city and the nearby sacred site of Al-Aqsa. The moment tightens the connection between movement through spaces and the politics that define them.

The next stop is Bethlehem, where Leila exits and steps into a tunnel that looks like authentic stone and mortar from the outside but feels modern and engineered inside. The juxtaposition mirrors how history and contemporary control intersect in daily life.

Beyond a door, a Palestinian flag keycard unlocks entry to the apartment. Leila sets the keycard down and begins a ritual of care, signaling a personal connection to space and memory.

She moves to a window where a plant or tree seems to take root in the interior earth, watering it with deliberate, meditative care. The act transforms the domestic space into a living symbol of resilience amid landscape shaped by conflict.

Inside the cabinet a spectrum of cans sits in neat rows; she pauses over one labeled Mloukhieh, a regional staple, before selecting another can. The moment links nourishment with memory, hinting at cultural roots in daily acts.

She then chooses a can labeled Marmaon, continuing the ritual of cooking as a thread to home and sustenance. The precise choice underscores how small details carry history and identity.

Using fingerprint access, she heats one of the contents and pours it into a bowl, mixing it slowly with other ingredients. The method blends technology and tradition, turning a simple meal into a careful act of care.

Returning to the window, she presses a wall panel that transforms the outside view to Jerusalem framed behind a barrier. The moment compresses history and daily life into a single glance, mirroring the film’s meditation on access and constraint.

The woman cradles her growing belly, revealing she is pregnant, and gazes outward at the city spread below from the high-rise interior. The scene reframes resilience as hopeful for the future, linking personal life with a larger landscape.

The film binds its storytelling to the elevator and its floors, using them as a map of Palestinian spaces where people navigate limits, access, and identity. Each stop offers a vignette that ties domestic life to broader social commentary and resilience.

The sequence culminates in a quiet meditation on presence, protection, and hope, where watering a plant, sharing a meal, and watching the balcony become acts of resilience in a restricted world. The domestic gestures become a universal language of endurance.