Letter to a Refusing Pilot

When Akram Zaatari was 16 years old, he experienced the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He took photographs, made audio recordings of fighter jets, and heard about an Israeli pilot who had refused to drop bombs on the school where his father was principal. Another pilot finished the job.

In 2013, Zaatari was a prominent Lebanese artist and filmmaker. Inspired by this childhood memory, he created a work as part of his installation at the Venice Biennale that was open to broad interpretation—about archive and memory, the human and the political. This Letter to a Refusing Pilot is a layered artistic exploration in which the past slowly breaks through to the present.

Zaatari juxtaposes shots at the rebuilt school with old family photos, diary quotes, staged scenes, archive footage, the classic novella Le petit prince by the pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and a mysterious sculpture that could portray both struggle and an embrace. Three boys throw paper airplanes. Are they a metaphor for the letter in the title?