Inside the Interval: The Palestinian Time of Incarceration in Mai Masri’s '3,000 Nights'

Speaker: Ms Rebecca Anastasi, Department of Media & Communications

Hosted by: Department of Media & Communications, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences

Programme:

12:15 Inside the Interval: The Palestinian Time of Incarceration in Mai Masri’s 3,000 Nights

13:00 Q & A session/informal discussion

Abstract:

Film scholarship on cinema's representation of time has historically privileged conceptualisations of film time as motion, continuity, and flow, underpinned by Gilles Deleuze’s adaptation of Henri Bergson’s arguments on the experience of time as duration. Film temporality, in this view, privileges qualitative duration, or the stretch of time, which stands in opposition to the invariable clock-and-calendar progression of quantitative, absolute and modern time. Yet, in the film '3,000 Nights' (2015), directed by the Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri, the women prisoners do not choose how they live duration and the stretch inside the prison is not simply experienced as an apolitical flow or flux of time. Rather, it is enforced – the number of nights counted is real as indicated by the title of the film.

Masri, rather than privileging the qualitative – movement and flow – over the quantitative – stillness and abstraction – in the detainees’ experience of imprisonment, enmeshes temporalities within the film’s elaboration of cinematic time. In so doing, the director configures a cinema of suspension that sculpts a temporality testifying to the ongoing dehumanisation of the Palestinian people and their allochronism (literally, ‘out of time’). Masri, thus, forges a contorted time, one that is fractured, halting and distended to create a stasis-in-movement that is constitutive of Palestinian incarceration.

Moreover, such contortions shift the locus of perspective, which in postcolonial studies is typically focused on issues of space and border relations of inside-outside, to, instead, foreground the vertical inequalities created in the exertion of biopolitical control over the Palestinian prisoners in their experience of prison time. Nonetheless, Masri’s film also suggests that the temporality of incarceration can give rise to a different form of hope, a new form of movement and a new life, one that emerges from, and is shaped by, the darkness of imprisonment.

Excerpts from the film will be shown during the discussion.

Speaker's Profile:

Rebecca Anastasi submitted her doctorate thesis in media and communications from the University of Malta in September 2025, with a thesis entitled A Cinema of Suspension: Political Temporalities in Women’s Filmmaking from Palestine and Israel. She has been a visiting lecturer in film studies within the Department of Media and Communications since 2015, where she is also a member of the department’s board of studies. She has presented parts of her research at the ECREA Film Studies Conference in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2023, and her most recent publication, entitled Borderline communities: aesthetic and authorial thresholds in the postcolonial script and film adaptations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The Namesake’, appeared in a special edition of ‘Interfaces: Image, Texte, Language’ (2022). Her research interests include adaptation, postcolonial film, film production, film temporalities, small nation cinema, and minority filmmaking.

Rebecca also possesses extensive industry experience having worked in the Maltese and international film and television sectors since 2002, on projects produced for the BBC, Sky/Impossible Pictures, and HBO, among others, across various departments including sound, assistant directors and, principally, production. Her production credits include 'Game of Thrones' (2011), 'Risen' (2015) directed by Kevin Reynolds, and 'Styx' (2017) directed by Wolfgang Fischer. She was the principal producer for the Maltese feature film, 'Luzzu', by Alex Camilleri, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2021 and was Malta’s submission for the Academy Awards. Moreover, Rebecca was also a programmer for the Valletta Film Festival (2015-2019) and is a Berlinale Talents Alumna (2021). She has been a participant in the European Women’s Audio-Visual Network’s (EWA) mentorship programme as well as Less Is More (LIM)’s Development Angels training programme. She is also a member of the European Film Academy (EFA).

Registration:

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