ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the entanglements of atrocity's afterlives as they inform discussion of writing the film, The Village Under the Forest. Whilst the film does not address or compare apartheid, the Shoah, or the Nakba, reflection on the dispersed itineraries of writing (journal entries, film scripts, scholarly sources) that came to shape the film very much do so. The chapter describes the thoughts on aesthetics of displacement – as writing from within the interstices of complicity with historical atrocities and their omissions – may encompass a way to think about complicity so as to unhinge alignments of atrocity with national narratives, territorial imaginaries, and reductive moral scripts. Similarly to Whilst Orlow's Unmade Film, The Village Under the Forest is a cinematic attempt to engage complicity in order to forge a space for thought and imagination as a condition for both life and futures, rather than obliteration or catastrophe in which the future is foretold in advance.
