All of your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. 

With a poetic video essay approach, Haig Aivazian picks apart light in its different forms and uses, from historical to current, spanning the development of a ubiquitous and seemingly simple tool through its connections to surveillance, safety, criminalisation, protest and more. From the whales killed for the first oil lamps that aided policing in the 18th century, to mapping and modelling technologies, to phone footage of contemporary protests on the streets of Beirut, the collage of images in All of Your Stars blends together seamlessly through a well-crafted balance of the factual and the associative. It is focused on the ambiguity of its core subject: a tool for control and policing can also be one for resistance and solidarity. Like all technology, light can be weaponised – in the wrong hands it discriminates and violates, in the right hands it can be mobilised for collective good, and Aivazian flicks the switch between the two with care and urgency.

Sanne Jehoul 

Director's filmography: Prometheus (2019), Not Every Day is Spring (2018), How Great you are O Son of the Desert! (2013)