The Reconnaissance is set in the landscape that contains the remains of the emptied village of Lifta, once situated outside Jerusalem. It is one of the few surviving traces of over four hundred Palestinian towns and villages depopulated in 1948. While plants—carob, prickly pear, olive—tell a quiet story of witnessing and resilience, a semi-fictional conversation about a possible future film set in Palestine can be overheard. The exchange between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Smithson takes place sometime between 1963 and 1967, somewhere between Palestine and New Jersey.