Gift (2025) arose from artist Han Mengyun’s residency in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, where she lived amid a vast expanse of date palms. From her window, the oasis appeared as a vast maternal organism: no visible boundary separates one farm from another, difference subsisting only through tacit silence. Learning that the grove is sustained almost entirely by female, fruit-bearing trees, the artist conceives it as a living body of the desert — one shaped by cycles of care, endurance, and ancestral knowledge. Its resilience and fertility mirror those of the peoples who have inhabited Al Ula for millennia, while the ascending leaf scars along each trunk record time like geological strata.

This intuition of the palms’ femininity deepened during the artist’s apprenticeship in palm-leaf weaving at Madrasat Addeera, Al Ula’s first girls’ school. Local botanical taxonomies distinguish female from male trees; Qur’anic narrative casts the palm as Maryam’s midwife; and vernacular lexicon names the beginning of weaving “birthing.” Within such interwoven knowledge systems, the plantation emerges as a matrilineal commons whose cycles of labor, care, and renewal structure both human and ecological time.

Gift translates fieldwork into a cinematic meditation. The film interlaces the artist’s poems written in AlUla with Qur’anic verses, folk songs, and intimate documentation of agricultural labor — the growth, pollination, decay, and death of date palms, and the necessity of human care. Alternating with these documentary moments are images of miniature paintings depicting the tales of Layla and Majnun, Yusuf and Zulaikha, the Persian prince Humay and Chinese princess Humayun. These stories of distant lovers and encounters between lands and cultures resonate with the film’s constructed scenes — in which the artist, a Chinese woman, follows a female rider across the desert and into the palm forests. Through these parallel journeys, Gift evokes the long literary history of curiosity, recognition, and imagination that binds disparate worlds across time.

The title, Gift, suggests that the film itself is an offering to the place of encounter — like the fruit of the earth, the music of birds, the shade of the palm, and the pearl as a verse.

*The work was developed during AlUla Visual Art Residency 2025, AlUla, Saudi Arabia. Supported by Arts AlUla and French Agency for AlUla Development (AFALULA).

Director: Han Mengyun

Director of Photography: River Yuhao Cao

Cast: Razan Abdullah, Han Mengyun, two brothers and a group of children, and farmers in Mabiti Farm, AlUla, Saudi Arabia, and those who wish to remain anonymous

Sound Recordist: Khalid Audih

Editor: Han Mengyun, River Yuhao Cao

Music Composer: Tara Al Dughaither

Singer and Vocal: Tara Al Dughaither, Sara Al Nahari

Sound Design & Mix: Cam Deas

Colour Grading: Nour Abukamal

Translator: Noran Reda, Sara Al Nahari

Production Assistant: Yi Lu

REFERENCES

Poem “Watermelon” by Han Mengyun

Surah Maryam 19:22–26, Qur’an

Untitled poem by Khalid Audih

Untitled poem by Han Mengyun

MUSIC

Songs and fieldrecordings by Tara Aldughaither, founder of Sawtasura; Women’s group singing, recorded by women in Al Ula, courtesy of Maqbula © 2025 Tara Aldughaither. All Rights Reserved

Special Thanks: Ali Alghazzawi, Sumantro Ghose, Hamad Al Homiedan, Arnaud Morand, Audrey Chazal, Noran Reda, Sara Al Nahari, Muyiwa Awosika, Anja Saleh, Marwah Almugait, Mohammad Alfaraj, Katia Vraïmakis, Luigi Galimberti, Ayman Zedani, Younès Ben Slimane, Salman Marzouq Al Shammari (owner of Mabiti Farm, AlUla, Saudi Arabia), Sam (manager of Mabiti Farm, AlUla, Saudi Arabia), the Farmers of Mabiti Farm, and the Female Weavers of Madrasat Addeera, AlUla, Saudi Arabia.