Number 52 * 2021

Number 52 (State of Palestine) is a short, intimate film by Nour Hijazi that unfolds as a lockdown confession and a quiet act of self-reconstruction. In the midst of the first Covid-19 confinement, Ahmad, supported by his friend Nour, undertakes an inner journey to interrogate what “freedom” can mean when home has become both geography and wound. The title gestures to a life reduced to an index, an entry in an administrative system, while the film insists on the opposite: the irreducible texture of a person. It traces Ahmad’s story back to the rupture of leaving Jerusalem seven years earlier, and builds a portrait of a young gay man navigating displacement, memory, and the fragile possibility of belonging.

​​

The film’s emotional architecture is carried by an original score composed by António Baía Reis, featuring a central piano composition that acts less as accompaniment than as a parallel voice, subtle, restrained, and persistent. The piano theme functions like a second interior monologue: it holds silence, tension, and tenderness in the gaps between spoken words, translating confinement into resonance and turning the domestic space into a chamber of listening. Rather than pushing the viewer toward melodrama, the soundtrack sustains the film’s contemplative tempo, allowing intimacy to emerge as a political condition, and vulnerability to read as a form of resistance.

​

Festival selections / showcases:

​​

• Lift-Off Global Network - First-Time Filmmaker Sessions (Official Selection)

​​

• Bendigo Queer Film Festival (2021) (Official Selection)

​​

• Beirut Love Film Festival (2021) (Official Selection)

​​​​​​

Number 52 operates as a small-scale work with large-scale implications: it connects queer life, displacement, and the bureaucratic violence of being “counted” rather than seen—while using the conditions of lockdown to intensify, rather than shrink, the cinematic space. The score’s piano-led restraint reinforces that ethics: it does not illustrate the image; it listens with it.