R A N S L A V I N

Ursulimum is the earliest known name for Jerusalem, recorded in Egyptian texts around 1330 BCE. Few cities have endured such sustained cycles of destruction and reconstruction. Besieged, razed, rebuilt—each regime imposed its order atop the remnants of the previous one, compressing centuries into a dense vertical palimpsest. Beneath the present city lies a vast, unfinished archaeology: tunnels, foundations, sealed chambers. Large portions remain inaccessible, unresolved. At the city’s core stands the Temple Mount—Har Habayit in Hebrew, Haram ash-Sharif in Arabic—among the most contested and symbolically charged sites on earth. For millennia it has been imagined as a center of origin, focused on the Foundation Stone: a point from which Judaism, Christianity, Roman paganism, and Islam aligned sacrifice, authority, and cosmology. Tradition holds that the First and Second Temples were built around this core. The Third Temple—never historically realized—persists as a suspended structure, existing simultaneously as prophecy, absence, and threat. It is a building defined not by stone, but by expectation. Ursulimum proceeds from documented history into an interior terrain. A seven-year-old boy, blindfolded beneath a helmet, moves through the city as if sensing it rather than seeing it, navigating invisible forces embedded in its ground. He is not clearly defined: child, instrument, messenger. His journey unfolds as a psychological passage—part initiation, part projection—through a space where belief, memory, and power collapse into one another. When he finally lifts the cloth from his eyes, the film returns to its opening moment, refusing resolution. The journey reveals itself as circular: a closed system without origin or conclusion, mirroring a city eternally excavated yet never fully uncovered.