Around 1936, a rumour spread in Jerusalem’s old city, which kept inhabitants indoors while a ghost took hold of the city, wandering its dark alleys at night.

80 years later, in the neighbourhood where the myth unfolded, a woman is trying to retrieve possessions that belonged to her family. Also in the dark and underneath the city, far from anyone’s eyes, a community of Palestinian workers employed in the construction of an Israeli underground burial site, are disputing work organization and allegiances to the different project managers involved.

In a place where myth assigns the ephemeral to the weight of fat, the body of the dead become a tool for speculating on property rights and value.

Habib Allah embarks on a journey across the heavy militarized Sinai Peninsula in Egypt led by a network of Bedouin smugglers. The only signposts are the stories they share about the stakes of living, dying, and moving through this precarious space.

Anecdotes transition into directions and allegiances are blurred, as is the state of the Bedouins, who remain unrecognized citizens of this land. Habib Allah is led behind the lines of military checkpoints, off the political, economic and historical grid, through a space where these Bedouins quietly maintain their traditions with the help of snakes.

Daga’a was shot over a period of a year and a half in the Sinai Peninsula, which is under Egyptian governance and mostly inhabited by Bedouin. The desert part of the Sinai has become very politically significant, especially as the main source of smuggled goods for the Gaza Strip. The film traces routes that the Bedouin use in the desert to smuggle goods and avoid the Egyptian army.