EVENT: NAGHAM EL-KHOURY (NOVEMBER 13–26 2026)
Displaced
digital video/machinima, 10 min, Lebanon/United Arab Emirates, 2024
created by Nagham El-Khoury
Displaced places a recorded conversation between Nagham El-Khoury and her mother within the virtual environments of Final Fantasy XIV: Online. Choosing to speak Arabic, El-Khoury’s mother recalls a childhood repeatedly disrupted by the Lebanese Civil War: the family moved fifteen times in search of safety, and an explosion outside a shared taxi in which she was waiting after school left bodies and severed limbs around the vehicle. The war persists in involuntary memory. She still hears a tank in her sleep. Her later departure from Lebanon was shaped by workplace discrimination during pregnancy and the family’s financial difficulties. In Dubai, material security coexists with a persistent absence of belonging. El-Khoury translates these recollections into a visual geography drawn from a commercial fantasy world, associating desert landscapes with Dubai, verdant forests with Lebanon, marketplaces with working life, and a burning city with the war. These correspondences emerge from the daughter’s interpretation of her mother’s testimony, yet the images possess their own fictional history, independent of the events they accompany. Displaced places documentary testimony inside a synthetic geography and leaves the distance between family memory and historical evidence unresolved.
Nagham El-Khoury is a Lebanese filmmaker born and raised in Dubai, where she lived until moving to the United Kingdom at eighteen. She studied Film Production at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. Videogames have been part of her visual culture since childhood, informing her interest in the expressive possibilities of interactive media. She has worked across short films, documentaries, live television, and interviews, with professional experience in Dubai, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Kingdom. Her earlier films include Static Relations, Aftershock (2022), a documentary on Lebanon’s economic crisis in the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion and the COVID-19 pandemic, and Same Time Next Year? (2023), a drama about grief and memory whose production notes cite Life Is Strange Remastered among its film references. Displaced (2024) was developed through Nouvelle Bug Vol. 2 and filmed inside Final Fantasy XIV: Online. It had its world premiere at CyBorg Film Festival in 2024 and later screened at RIGA IFF, DOKUBAZAAR, Ibrida, and PerSo. In 2025, it received the Ibrida Prize Internazionale.