Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled (2017) tells the story of two protagonists. One of them is an architecture, more specifically the Ellinikon Airport in Athens, which was decommissioned in 2001. The second one is an actor who represents, in some symbolic short, Naeem’s father who was forced to spend nine days wandering around the airport in the late 1970’s, while waiting for the opportunity to enter the territory of Greece. It is not entirely clear why he cannot leave the airport.

How does the 2017 film pre-empt situations we all find ourselves in during the pandemic? Curator Jen Kratochvil thinks about this parallel, as well as about the film’s composition bipolarity.

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