The book enacts a making process. A production diary as a companion to a film. An archive of creative resistance.
The book, titled Stars at Midday 1 is a series of diaristic texts, observations and narratives, which accompany photographs. These photographs show scenes and the making of a film on location, A Night We Held Between. 2
I came across this book before the film and it introduced me to Noor Abed’s practice. I was drawn to the exposed binding and natural textures in its material form. This kind of binding technique is usually hidden beneath a cover and it involves a linking of chains; it is always done by hand. It creates a flexible book, where the pages will open flat and sit comfortably open. I consider the craft, the decision and openness as I hold it.
I read the blurb and am interested in the idea of this book being separate and co-existent to its counterpart in film. Recording a series of actions within time, the book will exist without a score or pace to uphold. It will travel in daylight and encounter others, as was done within the narrative. The stories it tells can be applied to the film but I read it alone and interact with characters Abed meets. Unfolding, I am able to fill in a story. The gaps in the archive must be detailed and it is important that this recording, of the journey it took to make this film, exists.
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To Noor Abed,
The book opens with a dedication to your father and with a poem to your body. ‘There is another body in my body’, but it moves further than this duality.
We meet your aunt, who you visited for coffee, and family members and friends in photos—that were found in your grandparents’ house after they passed away. These images stayed with you and you sketched scenes from them. You visited them and retold stories of past information.
We meet your father and H, local vendors, D and his friends, F and K, L and local children, a young man on a donkey, three women with bending backs. R, Z, M and a singing group, your mother, two friends. A, a shepherd, S and N, a butcher.
Not all of these people are in the film, but you share stories of them and their interactions in the text. I enjoy meeting them and in part meeting you. We take you, the author, as our friend and begin to log the connections and relationships you offer us. The people are your family and friends. It is communal and close. Bodies within and beyond the frame, leave a trace.
*
A reverence to the details; each section is bound with delicate variation: shifts in paper texture, in the weight of the page, in the colour of the text. Subtle changes that guide us gently through segments and transitions, and honor the hands and gestures behind the lens. There is a deep attentiveness to detail and collaboration of this process.
Abed speaks of the land as body, and the book echoes this sentiment in form. The layered materials, skin, soil, and strata. Each page is a surface that holds memory, weight, and work. Materiality becomes meaning. In this binding, nothing is hidden, everything is held.
‘Researching Palestinian folktales for a few years now, I have always been amazed by the communal aspect of these tales and at how much these communities are aware of the landscape around them—in every tale, the details of a stone, a cave, a particular side of a mountain, etc. They know it deeply; it’s theirs; they own it.’ 3
On page 64 we meet R at the archive. The narration for the film is a recording called ‘Song for the Fighters’ 4. In the book it is recited that several days were spent at the Popular Art Centre in Ramallah, within the sonic archive, where this recording was found at minute 43:00 of a file titled ‘women’s songs, Um Alif and her neighbours sing from the folklore, Tarshila, Galil’. We hear the endurance that went into searching for this sound and the faith in working towards a feeling. The voices that sing, from within the archive, are not just historical traces; they are vessels of memory and resistance. Their resonance carries more than melody, they hold stories, lineages, geographies. Emotion passed, intact and embodied.
On page 25, Abed writes, ‘I remember a subtle urgency to see. It was not a choice but rather a voice.’ An idea, where vision is led by voice, deepens the sense that the book listens as much as it shows. What is seen emerges from what is heard, felt, and remembered. The voice becomes a guide, of sound, material, gesture and memory. This attunement to voice as a carrier of knowledge is echoed in the physical form of the book, where the logic of storytelling unfolds across surfaces and joins.
On pages 40-41 we see an image, spread across two pages, of a car that was used as a darkroom, a surface for snacks, a traveling vessel, and a safe(r) space to navigate the land. It is referenced in several stories and enables Abed, their father, and H to interact with flexibility and discovery. The presence of the multi-functioning vehicle is interrupted with green stitching, contrasting the dark drape and silver body. It is a join in the book and holds it together. I read the binding becoming part of the narrative logic; a material language that remembers, marking the book itself as an active archive of experience, adaptation, and care.
There is a preservation of the interactions made in this process. We are given a partial view. The text is a fragment and witness to the making. But to read this book, in hand, quietly, is different to the interaction with the cinema screen. Outside of and to the side of the cinematic frame, the scene grows and spreads in each direction.
It is important that it took several attempts to find the dancers, that we know the conditions in which you scouted for locations in, that you were not able to find a black goat’s head. It was an act of improvisation, as is necessity in Palestine, to record and to not forget.
Footnotes
- Abed, Noor, Stars at Midday, 2025
- Abed, Noor, A Night We Held Between, 2024.
- Jarrar, Adele, “For All Wars to Come”: An Interview with Noor Abed, Issue 31, August 2023
- Tarshiha, Galil, Women’s songs, Um Ali and her neighbours sing from the folklore
- Stars at Midday is published by Occasional Papers