Lynne Sachs and Nir Zats in Person

At a time when conflicts scar the globe, the experimental States of UnBelonging seeks to personalize the violence by considering a single death: that of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker living on a kibbutz near the West Bank, who was killed-along with her two young children-by a terrorist. The visually arresting film's layered and refracted images drawn from television news and home videos shot in both Israel and New York, where director Sachs lives, attest to the complex process of “accompanying” a stranger in her death. Sachs and former student Nir Zats, who lives in Tel Aviv, seek to fill in details of Ohayon's life and the hostile landscape where she lived and died. Drawing on the Bible, Allen Ginsberg's poetry, and interviews with Ohayon's family, the film is a three-year search for a person beyond reach, a meditation on things one cannot know, a moving kaddish for uncertain, dangerous times.