Triggered by the memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, this film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed during a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people.

He asked me: “Ms Ziadah, don’t you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children? (...). Pause. I look inside me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza. Patience has just escaped me. Pause. Smile. We teach life, sir! (...) These are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied. And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand dead. (...) Is anybody out there? Will anyone listen? I wish I could wail over their bodies. I wish I could just run barefoot in every refugee camp and hold every child, cover their ears so they wouldn't have to hear the sound of bombing for the rest of their life the way I do. (...) Today my body was a TV’d massacre. We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.”