A Short Story is an animated film Sabella made at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic — the moment the fragility of the body became a shared, global fact. It returns to Exit (2006), his photographic series of the aged, translucent hands of people living their final days in an Irish hospice, and sets those still images in motion. The hands stir, and the photographs become a film about the one thing that belongs to everyone: the essence — and the end — of being human.

He chose to carry it through image alone, with no text and no narration, so the work reaches you through feeling before thought. As a moving remake of Exit, it deepens that series' question of exile — not the geographical exile of a Palestinian from Jerusalem, but an existential one, where the body itself becomes an "exilic landscape." Animated years later, these hands turn the film into both elegy and reflection: a reminder of our shared vulnerability, and of the universality of life's end.