White Oil is a single screen film that excavates a number of narratives around the quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. The film was made over a period of three years and is premised on a practice where intersubjective relations were one of the most important features in the making of this film. There are over 350 quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. The stone excavated has been termed the 'white oil' of Palestine and is the only raw material available to support the Palestinian economy and provides a livelihood for over 20,000 workers. However, of the stone and sand excavated from the quarries 65% is expropriated by Israel for the construction of Israel, and to build the illegal settlements in the West Bank, with Israel also exporting the stone internationally and claiming it as their own product. Today almost every hillside is scarred by the brutal incision of the quarries. Walking through the landscape of the West Bank this mutilation becomes disconcertedly visible to the naked eye. The land is pillaged and defaced, its wound left open to reveal a 'geology of disaster'. White Oil explores the way the quarries are not just industrial spaces in which labour and excavation of raw material take place, but lived spaces by unfolding narratives around colonialism, expropriation of land and mobility through the day-to-day lives of the quarry owners, workers and security guards. This includes their personal histories and experiences as well as the changing landscape and conditions of the quarries bringing to bear the myriad losses of land, economy, identity, history and community. The film engages with the interstices of a number of genres; photography, documentary, the cinematic, fiction and testimony, with ethnographic methodologies playing an important role. Filmed in a number of locations in the West Bank images are highly composed and imbued in the language of the static frame, the durational image and the aesthetics of delay. Essential to the making of the film has been a collaborative mode of address with the participants with the owners, workers and security guards engaged in the filmmaking process, and the role of the artist, as filmmaker, activist and ethnographer coming under scrutiny. White Oil is structured around the interplay between day and night. The day scenes focus on the decimation of the landscape: the machines and non-human elements, settlements and landscape, sounds of industry and cutting of the stone. The night scenes, by contrast, are more narrative and intimate, focusing on the social gathering of the Alshalaldaha Brothers and their associates who rent land to excavate the stone from a small quarry in Birzeit on the outskirts of Ramallah. The brothers and their associates are from Hebron in the South of the West Bank. They spend five nights a week camping out in a metal shipping container in the quarry as their journey home from Birzeit to Hebron through Jerusalem takes four times longer – nearly three hours as a result of the checkpoints and the Separation Wall. In the night scenes the quarry becomes a dwelling with moments of resistance. Ramzi Safid, a security guard and a generation older, appears intermittently throughout the film and provides a narration and consistency. He spends five nights a week sleeping in a portakabin overlooking the quarry at Rafat on the outskirts of Ramallah, before going to his day job as a plumber for the municipality.