Noor Aburafeh

The film centers on the mythologies surrounding salt and on its history, long intertwined with starvation. Salt has been used to preserve food through scarcity, and was vital during famines—natural or man-made—as in late Ottoman Palestine under British colonialism, and today in Gaza under Israeli genocide. 

Footage from the Dead Sea in Jericho, Palestine, is interwoven with archival fragments. A lullaby, inspired by Moroccan songs from what was known as The Year of Hunger/The Year of the Locust, draws from a regional literary tradition using promise to call the morning closer. 

Sung to children before sleep, these songs soothed their hunger while stones were boiled as a pledge of a future meal.