Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley – Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2013)

Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (2013) depicts the Druze community, a Levantine religious minority within the Ismaili branch of Islam. Recordings of the Druze Soldiers working as interpreters in the Israeli Military Court system in the West Bank and Gaza are contrasted with recordings from the “Shouting Valley,” Golan Heights, where the Druze population gather on both sides of the Israeli/Syrian Border and shout across the jurisdictions to family and friends on the other side, thus using language as a means to subvert and navigate militarized space. Inhabiting the border between Israel/Palestine and Syria, the Druze community is necessarily polylingual, echoing this instability of territories in the mutability of language.