The Palestinian artist and filmmaker’s surreal investigation of the Lunar Embassy has plenty to say about earth and the limitations we place upon it
What if it were easier to purchase land on the moon than to return to your homeland? This is the central question of Mona Benyamin’s short film Moonscape (2020), a surreal journey through the legal loopholes that have made the prospect of land ownership in outer space a reality for almost anyone with an internet connection. Benyamin, a Palestinian artist who was born in Israel and holds an Israeli passport, introduces a Lunar Embassy in a mournful yet absurdist Arabic ballad, sung to the camera by her two lead narrators, played by her own parents. Founded in 1980 by former car salesman Dennis M. Hope, they narrate, the Embassy has since sold millions of acres on the moon, in addition to offering galactic passports and nationalities. While the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids governments from claiming national sovereignty over any celestial body, it failed to mention individuals, thereby allowing Hope to claim the moon for himself.
‘Perhaps you can’t own it here….but you can own it up there!’, the Lunar Embassy promises on its website. This is a fantastical exercise in dreaming up an alternative reality, far away from Earth – a people’s precursor to the recent aspirations to luxury space travel concocted by the likes of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Benyamin describes the moon as ‘one of the most romanticised objects in the history of humankind, in addition to it being a symbol for the future – a different kind of future’ in an email correspondence with the Lunar Embassy, displayed in screenshots that flash across the screen in Moonscape. Yet when she asks how many Palestinians own land on the moon, she learns that the answer is none at all. So begins a meditation on land ownership on the moon as an indicator of the hopefulness of a nation. Benyamin asks whether any of the countries in the Arab world, for whom war, violence and dispossession is a longstanding and ongoing reality, have looked to outer space in their dreams of another world. The data from the Lunar Embassy is stark: only Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have made ‘a handful of orders’ in the last few years; by contrast, none have come from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt.
The Lunar Embassy’s offer of galactic passports is a fraught one in this context, ostensibly an alternative to the restrictions imposed by earthbound geopolitics and yet useless in practice, as Benyamin confirms in an email with the company. While the promise of owning land on the moon is, inevitably, shown to be merely a fantasy too, with the title deeds offering no recourse if NASA were to choose to evacuate the owner from their lunar home. ‘You will have to live in eternal fear’, the narrator intones, again and again. It is a refrain that underscores the simmering despair hidden beneath the glimpses of hope that can be found throughout Moonscape, echoed in the film’s awkward, highly choreographed staging, brooding soundscape and found footage of the moon taken from film history and the NASA archives. In looking upwards and outwards into the night sky for a way out, Benyamin reflects on the limits of imagination. For many, there is no way home.
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Mona Benyamin, Moonscape, 2020, single-channel video, 17 min.
17 July–18 August 2025
Courtesy the artist
Mona Benyamin (b. 1997, Palestine; lives and works between Palestine and the Hudson Valley, New York) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and cellist. Her work explores intergenerational experiences of dispossession and the construction and transmission of memories, focusing on the interplay between experience and witness, trauma, and temporal consciousness. Through appropriating formats from mass media, tampering with their apparatuses, utilising dark humour, and collaborating with her immediate surroundings – namely, her parents – Benyamin creates films and narratives where surrealism and hyperrealism seem to collide.
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