My paper analyzes the experimental moving image practice of contemporary Palestinian artist/filmmaker, Basma Alsharif, which examines the political as a site of investigation that does not resemble the more defined parameters of candid documentary reproductions. Employing a hyperreal aesthetic, Alsharif addresses considerations around homeland and occupied lands, and the undefinable spaces between the known and the unknowable. Her poetic works destabilize image, text, and sound, and offer an alternative to a social consciousness that cannot be penetrated because of its media-saturated realities. Arresting our attention by decolonizing the ethnographer’s gaze, Alsharif’s films move against representing Palestinian communities, but rather present portraits that challenge viewers to better understand a place continually embroiled with conflict and invent ways to exist there. The viewer is never certain what they are seeing and any comprehension of history is seen as pliable, and often imposed by Western representations of marginalized communities. Her works can’t be associated with a specific time and place; they engage with evasive spaces where stories can’t quite be grasped, where history is subjective, and any notion of the real is contested. Simultaneously, Alsharif is invested in the experience of reinterpreting traumatic events repeatedly to reveal things that can’t be communicated and to allow for new meanings to be created. Repetition is not used to bring the story forward, but rather it is employed because the story is too harrowing to be communicated otherwise. By considering how people and civilizations endure and how they are destroyed over time, the artist asks: what kinds of speculative imaginaries are possible even after a political or social destruction? My paper analyzes these issues through a visual studies lens, film theory, and through the writings of feminist, decolonial, and post-colonial scholars. It contemplates how the experimental documentary format grants Alsharif the ability to engage with people and speak with and through their struggles (Minh-ha). Additionally, it examines how artistic processes can represent the other (Tuck and Yang), and how language can fall short in its ability to communicate a contested event (Deleuze). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton, 1968. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.   Minh-ha, Trinh T. “The Language of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific Conversation of Man with Man.” American Feminist Thought at Century’s End. Ed. Linda S. Kauffman. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.