Sound Art · 2026-08-15
Twenty-five years of dreams: Israelis and Palestinians talk about their nights
A French reporter has been collecting Israelis' and Palestinians' accounts of their nights since 2001. In July, twenty-five years of recordings became a six-part sound documentary in the France Culture strand that dissolves the boundaries between genres.
For twenty-five years the French reporter Élodie Maillot asked the same question: tell me about your nights. Since 2001 she has been recording Israelis and Palestinians talking about their dreams and their sleeplessness — and told them her own in return. Out of that archive came "Au pays des songes, 2001–2026" (In the Land of Dreams), a six-part sound documentary on France Culture.
The starting point is the summer of 2001, shortly before 11 September: in her early twenties and only just starting out at the microphones of Radio France, the reporter decided to spend nights "outside time" in Israel and Palestine. She then returned for years, recording what the official description calls the "B-side of the news": everyday life, hopes, curfews, frustration, nights out, live music — and real dreams, the ones people dream when the news falls silent. All of it at the start of the second intifada, without a fixer or a newsroom, walking alone in the dark, "drawn to the lights like a moth", as she writes, wanting only to "listen to what happens beneath closed eyelids".
The recordings were never broadcast. They lay on DAT cassettes, MiniDiscs and analogue tape — formats that grew obsolete over the same years in which our picture of the conflict kept changing. The tapes were preserved by Régine Maillot in her cellar.
The episodes: "And God created the night…", "On the road, and between the lines", "Walls, walls and lamentations", "In pursuit of dreams", "And the night created woman", "A view of the sea and the horizon".
Maillot eventually sought out the people she had met twenty-five years earlier — in the series they listen back to their own voices from that time. In the montage, Palestinian and Israeli voices answer one another, something that now seems impossible in reality.
The author has spent more than twenty years working around sound and music in many forms: chiefly for French public radio, but also for the BBC and the American NPR. She creates sound works for the stage and for albums, founded a label, and has run radio workshops in Congo, Benin and France — with secondary-school students, asylum seekers and artists.
Cast & Crew
- Author Élodie Maillot
- Director David Jacubowiez
- Original music Arthur Simonini (with Yom and Ceccaldi)
- Mixing Julien Doumenc
- Recording (Palestine, Israel) Élodie Maillot
- Recording (Paris) Emmanuel Armain, Marie-Claire Oumabady, Olivier Harnay
- Coordination Aurélie Charon, Inès Dupeyron
- Voices Adam, Dana, Diana, Leila, Ohaila, Régine, Ramzi, Gallia, Olympe, Esperanza, Iman, Tony, Sayed, Tamar, Juliette, Maidal, Ruttie, Benji, Assaf, Iyab
- Translation voices Marie Constant, Pascaline Bonnet, Eliah Shalom, Nicolas Berger, Maïwenn Guiziou, Anaïs Ysebaert, Romain de Becdelièvre, Manon Houssin
- First broadcast 1–7 July 2026 (France Culture, L'Expérience)
- Running time 6 parts, 14–28 minutes; single version: 1 hour 59 minutes
Sources: Télérama — the review that flagged the piece (2026-07-28) · France Culture — the series' official description and credits (2026-07-07) · France Culture — episode list of L'Expérience (via aggregator) (2026-07-07) · Philharmonie de Paris (La Balise) — Élodie Maillot's contributor page (2026-08-13)
AI involvement — Research: partly · Writing: partly · Verification: partly. The article is based on machine translation of original texts in French.