Agential Pasts and Futures: An Interview with Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind

On the occasion of Palestinian artist and filmmaker Larissa Sansour and Danish writer and filmmaker Søren Lind’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, Rogue Agents of History at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, and the world premiere of their film A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed (2026), curator Nat Muller speaks with the duo about the research behind their latest film and their abiding interest in speculative fiction as a method to interrogate historical memory and contemporary political narratives. Rogue Agents of History runs until 27 September 2026.

Nat Muller (NM): Your recent film, A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed (2026), is a Palestinian pirate ghost story that explores questions of ownership, memory, and material heritage amid historical and ongoing erasure. Commissioned by Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, an ethnographic museum, for the exhibition Rogue Agents of History, the film draws on objects from three Dutch heritage museums (Wereldmuseum, Museum Catharijneconvent, National Maritime Museum) and was shot in museum depots and galleries, amongst other locations. How did you approach working with these artefacts, both conceptually and cinematically? And how did you open up alternative narratives and temporalities for objects that are usually defined by a fixed museum catalogue description?

Larissa Sansour (LS) + Søren Lind (SL): When we were initially approached by the Wereldmuseum and invited to interact with their collection, we were already in early development on a project about the Bethlehem souvenir industry’s golden age in the late nineteenth century. With sudden access to the museum’s vast depots of colonial artefacts, our first inclination was to build on our existing project by identifying objects in the Wereldmuseum collections that could support the narrative we had in mind. But as the Middle East did not play a significant role in Dutch colonial history, we soon realised that the amount of Bethlehem souvenirs in the collection was rather modest. So we started searching for another point of entry into the collection, attempting to probe and single out items with unique storytelling potential, only to end up baffled not by any singular items per se but by the sheer amount of artefacts, which were stored in warehouses the size of airport hangars with objects stacked floor to ceiling. So we realised that our fascination was with the bulk of these objects, that’s where the story was. This in turn inspired the piracy angle, with the project soon settling within the restitution debate: the demand to reclaim and return looted artefacts to their countries of origin.

Once the fictional framework for our film was mapped out and we began pre-production, art direction, and costume, a small selection of artefacts from the collection with relevance for our story were identified, with the ambition to use these as props directly in the film. But this was also easier said than done, as every single one of these artefacts, as you say, already came catalogued, analysed, weighed, and measured with their own factual stories. At first, this caused a trepidation on our part, a confusion as to how to weave these factual stories of heritage and origin into our pirate script, as if the documentation of these objects made them immune or resistant to fictionalisation somehow. But once our characters were developed – our pirate captain, our souvenir merchant, and the other ghost passengers on board – their back stories and their dialogues soon began to negotiate these objects, tweak them to fit the storyline, and the factual history of these objects eventually served as a welcome guideline for the direction they could be reinterpreted in, rather than a hindrance.

NM: In the film, a dialogue unfolds between a seventeenth-century Palestinian pirate queen and a nineteenth-century Bethlehemite devotional objects merchant. The film juxtaposes the remarkable but little-known late nineteenth-century history of Bethlehem’s globally connected merchants and entrepreneurs with the successive catastrophes of Palestinian dispossession, from World War I and the British Mandate to the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa. What made you want to bring these two histories into conversation, and what emerged from the tension between them?

LS + SL: As we were searching for locations to shoot our film, we came across a beautiful one-to-one replica of an East Indiaman from the early 1700s. This ship had all the theatricality of a pirate ship, so the emergence of our pirate captain is really a case of a location inspiring the storyline. The history of piracy is inextricably linked to colonial powers, and with the Wereldmuseum collection being largely comprised of artefacts looted from Dutch colonies, it seemed appropriate to cast our pirate in the role of an anticolonial revolutionary with an aim to set history straight and reclaim the looted objects on behalf of their countries of origin, returning not only the objects but also the privilege to tell the stories they hold.

The souvenir project already in development featured a souvenir merchant from the late nineteenth century. This is a very interesting period in Palestinian history. The Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Bethlehem merchants were already accumulating great wealth abroad from their appearances particularly at the world’s fairs. So, it was a time of great optimism for Palestinians – but given the developments in the twentieth century, those hopes of a bright future were soon to be dashed. The other passengers on board the ship are all from the twentieth century, and are decades ahead of the merchant. They have all experienced what he has yet to see, so their stories serve as ominous forebodings of a time to come.

What these two characters had in common, the captain and the merchant, was a shared fascination for artefacts and storytelling, but with different approaches. While the captain runs a restitution campaign, saving these artefacts and protecting the integrity of their stories, the merchant relies on fiction, religion, and mythology to market manufactured objects to his clients abroad. And this clash, their differing views on objects and storytelling, became the driving force in the script.

NM: Earlier works such as A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012), In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016), and In Vitro (2019) locate agency in imagined futures. This new work appears to find it in the past, through the merchant and the pirate captain. Can you talk about that shift, and especially what it means in this very dark moment with ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza continuing?

LS + SL: Reverting to the past for agency doesn’t quite feel like a major shift for us. In our futuristic films, the past is constantly negotiated and manipulated – temporalities are blurred to allow counter-narratives to establish themselves and challenge the political status quo. The past is always there as an agent in its own right, at all times an active participant in the shaping of contemporary dialogue. Storytelling, memory, and inherited trauma are recurring themes in our work, and they remain central to the pirate film as well, with the merchant’s future also increasingly present and approximated by way of the stories told to him by his fellow passengers. The souvenirs he carries with him in his ship’s chest are vehicles for the kind of mythology and fiction that will keep his homeland under foreign rule in the future as well. So just as in the futuristic films, the agency is narrative, and the ambition is to negotiate the past with a view to change the present and the future.

The genocide in Gaza is also a devastating example of the importance of controlling narrative and maintaining the ability to suppress counter-narratives, with the frantic efforts by the Israelis to cling on to their narrative advantage by perpetuating a mythology of innocent victimhood in a hostile neighbourhood. Over the past few years, we have witnessed their despair at seeing this mythology slowly but surely falling apart, despite desperate campaigns to dismiss any challenge to their narrative supremacy as erroneous and driven by antisemitism. Keeping Gaza sealed off from international journalists in order to bar independent scrutiny of their actions while removing any evidence of their barbarous acts is, of course, part of this campaign.

NM: Your films draw on a wide range of genres. You are most known for your use of science fiction in the films mentioned above, but you have also explored a number of other genres: the western of Bethlehem Bandolero (2004), the psycho-horror of Sbara (2008), documentary (Soup over Bethlehem, 2006; Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T, 2007; Feast of the Inhabitants, 2012), opera (As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, 2022), fictionalised memoir (Familiar Phantoms, 2023), and now a pirate film. What interests you in these different genres, and how does each allow you to tell Palestinian stories in distinct ways?

LS + SL: Before we started exploring these genres, our work was documentary-based. This was in the early 2000s when the emergence of affordable digital cameras sparked a wave of very good and very necessary Palestinian documentaries. With so many important films already being made by skilled documentary storytellers, we soon felt a need to add to this catalogue of films by framing the Palestinian predicament in a different way. Curators and film programmers expected documentary work from Palestine, and this idea of Palestinians as the eternal subjects of documentary started feeling like a confinement. It became a default language in which Palestinians were reduced to their victimhood and the acuteness of their situation to a perpetual cycle of despair. So we started experimenting with forms not traditionally associated with the Middle East or with politics in general: sitcoms, westerns, and eventually science fiction. It became important to challenge expectations and introduce difficult topics in formats usually associated with entertainment. Resorting to fiction and in turn science fiction also removed the obligation to frame the situation within the current political dialogue, freeing us to address the concepts that far too often fell through the cracks when addressing Palestine in real-time. This exploration of genres has continued ever since.

NM: Returning to A Sunken Tale, what was particularly compelling about the figure of the pirate in a Palestinian context?

LS +SL: As soon as the pirate captain developed into this anticolonial protagonist on a mission to reclaim heritage, restore narrative agency, and set history straight, it made perfect sense to us to make her Palestinian. With her natural outspokenness, activism, and record of standing up to authority, Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi was the obvious choice for this role, and she embraced the challenge with fervour and animation. It was truly a joy to watch her on set. And again, the very idea of a Palestinian pirate film comes from the same early desire to frame the Palestinian situation in an unexpected cinematic language and to defy expectations in an attempt to test and subvert conventional perceptions of the Palestinian predicament.

NM: Since In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, your work has taken a darker, more dystopian turn, often shaped by themes of loss and death. In As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, grief appears as an endless lament with no clear horizon. Yet in Familiar Phantoms, and especially A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, humour and levity re-emerge as forms of existential and political defiance. How do you see the role of levity in relation to loss in your recent work?

LS + SL: After a series of science fiction works revolving around memory, loss, genetics, and inherited trauma, our opera As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night took these concepts and gave them a different form: a pathos-driven aria about the loss of a child and the epigenetic transfer of trauma between generations. Allowing ourselves this musical experiment was quite liberating – it felt like wrapping up an era so that something new and exciting could begin. Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary made up of autobiographical stories accumulated through the decades, and it’s perhaps exactly because it is personal that humour once again found its way into the script. Humour was permissible and came naturally as part of the development of that project. With the pirate film, humour was not just permissible but mandatory. The genre comes with a certain obligation to embellish characters in a humorous way. There’s a natural playfulness to it, colourful costumes, period drama, and we embraced all of that, making it a fun project to do.

NM: In Granada, you are currently filming a new commission for the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), which is set to premiere in 2027. The film has no spoken dialogue and explores the Arab heritage of Andalusia alongside flamenco, a tradition rooted in marginalised Romani communities. Could you talk about the research behind the project, what it means to bring Palestinian and Andalusian histories into conversation, and how you approached collaborating with a dancer while returning to a non-verbal cinematic form for the first time since Nation Estate?

LS + SL: In 2027, CCCB will be hosting a show celebrating the one-hundredth birthday of experimental Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella and has invited a selection of artists to respond to his films. In our case, the film is Mudanza (2008), which deals with the erasure of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s execution in Granada by Franco loyalists in 1936 and his subsequent erasure from history until he was rehabilitated after the end of the Franco regime. The museum invited us to respond to this particular film, as they saw parallels between the cultural erasure and murders by the Franco regime (1936–75) and the genocide in Gaza. We don’t often accept such invitations, as the set framework rarely aligns with our thematics, but in this case we were intrigued, not only because of the brutal culture of silencing and erasure promoted by the Franco regime and successive Israeli governments alike, but also because of the Arabic heritage of Andalusia and Lorca’s fascination with Arabic poetry. So we started researching the region, the historical era, and immersed ourselves in Lorca’s poetry, and we soon became intrigued by the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal persecution of minorities unwilling to convert to Catholicism following the fall of Granada in 1492. This marginalised and ostracised the Muslim, Jewish, and Roma populations, and it was the shared struggle of these three groups that led them to fuse their musical traditions in an act of resistance, which eventually gave rise to flamenco. We found it interesting to combine these two performative reactions to the marginalisation and erasure of minorities and dissenting voices in a single work. We are currently in the post-production stages of this project, and while the film is largely voiceless, it will feature a resampling of one of Lorca’s most celebrated and haunting poems, ‘Gacela of the Dark Death’, published posthumously a few years after his execution and burial in an unmarked mass grave, with his body yet to be recovered, a fate shared by so many of the unidentified victims in Gaza.

NM: I have been eagerly awaiting your first science-fiction feature film. You are filming a sequel to In Vitro (2019) this autumn. What can you share about it?

LS + SL: Yes, we are currently developing our first arthouse feature film, which we are scheduled to shoot in autumn 2026. In Memory of Times to Come, as it is titled, is inspired by In Vitro – it is a sequel in the sense that it starts where In Vitro ends, albeit with slightly altered premises and protagonists. In Vitro took place underground thirty years after a disaster. It was a lockdown film, if you will, with a group of scientists waiting to reinhabit their hometown of Bethlehem once it was safe to do so. Our upcoming film is a repopulation film. Bethlehem is once again habitable, and a new population of clones engineered from the DNA of those lost in the disaster has recently moved in. Their aim is to establish a utopian society, the Palestine that never came to be. To prevent this new society from becoming a replica of a tragic past, these clones have had their memory erased in an attempt to eliminate trauma from the equation. As in In Vitro, the main character is played by Maisa Abd Elhadi, and for her character the memory erasure doesn’t quite go as planned, prompting her to question her surroundings and search for the truth behind the social experiment she is part of.