Ahlam al-Manfa: Frontiers of Dreams and Fears
Mai Masri
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"The lives of two young Palestinians through several months of their lives in the Shatila refugee camp and Bethlehem's al-Dhaysha refugee camp; their extraordinary journey to the borders of exile separating them from their homeland and from each other." |
Ashoura: This Blood Spilled In My Veins
Jalal Toufic
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"Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the son of the first Shi‘ite imam, ‘Alî, was slaughtered alongside many members of his family in the desert in 680. This memory is torture to me. But, basically, one can say this memory is torture to me of every memory, since each reminiscence envelops at some level the memory of the origin of memory, the torture had to be inflicted on humans in order to make them remember (Nietzsche). The memory that the yearly commemoration of ‘Âshûrâ’ is trying to maintain is not only or mainly that of the past, but the memory of the future, namely the promise of the Parousia of the twelfth imam, the long-awaited Mahdî—notwithstanding the passage of a millennium since his occultation—as well as the corresponding promise of Duodeciman Shi‘ites to wait for him. ‘Âshûrâ’: A Condition of Possibility of an Unconditional Promise." |
Children of Fire
Mai Masri
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Intimate portraits of a five year old boy and an eleven year old girl in Nablus give a personal perspective to the Palestinian intifada. The film maker, Mai Masri, is originally from Nablus. |
Children of Shatila
Mai Masri
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"Fifty years after the exile of their grandparents from Palestine, the children of Shatila camp attempt to come to terms with the realities of being refugees in a camp which has survived massacre, siege and starvation."
Two Palestinian children -given video cameras- express the realities of their daily lives and their history. |
Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green
Jalal Toufic
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"Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green registers the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster (the fifteen-year Lebanese war); produces completed crossword puzzles with subsisting blank spaces in a country of shattered shop signs; exhibits the rise in 1992-Beirut of a sublime architecture of bricks in a period where it appears Arabs are being driven to the Stone Age (Palestinians throwing stones at the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories, etc.); and uses fiction to document the eruption of psychotic effects in and outside mental hospitals." |
Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (Houna wa rubbama hounak)
Lamia Joreige
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Walking along the former Green Line, Joreige asks residents whether they know anyone who was kidnapped there during the war; archive photos of checkpoints are cut against present-day streets. |
In This House (Fi hatha al-bayt)
Akram Zaatari
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Zaatari digs up the letter a resistance fighter buried in a mortar shell in the garden of a south Lebanese house he occupied, watched by uneasy neighbours and intelligence officers. |
Lasting Images (Images rémanentes)
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige
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An undeveloped Super 8 reel left by Khalil Joreige's uncle, kidnapped in 1985 and still missing, is developed fifteen years later; only faint ghostly images surface from the white film. |
Letter to a Refusing Pilot
Akram Zaatari
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Starts from a 1982 rumour in Saida that an Israeli pilot refused to bomb a school (the one founded by Zaatari's father) and dropped his bombs at sea; the pilot turned out to be real. |
Memories for a Private Eye
Rania Stephan
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Through the detective of Preminger's Laura, Stephan investigates the only moving image of her dead mother and the war's effect on her family. First chapter of a trilogy on her personal archive. |
Missing Lebanese Wars
Walid Raad
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"The possibilities and limits of writing the history of the Lebanese Civil War considering it not only as an established chronology of events, dates, personalities, massacres, and invasions, but also as an abstraction constituted by various discourses and, more importantly for Dr. Fakhouri -the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon-, out of his notebooks, various modes of assimilating the data of the world." |
Objects of War
Lamia Joreige
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Each person chooses an everyday object from the war years, a Walkman, a jerrycan, a photo, and tells their story through it; an archive of many conflicting versions instead of one official history. |
On Three Posters
Rabih Mroué
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A video reflection on the 2000 performance Three Posters, built on the unedited tape in which resistance fighter Jamal al-Sati recorded three takes of his 1985 'martyr' testimony. |
Seule avec la Guerre
Danielle Arbid
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Post-war Lebanon, throughout the reconstruction of Beirut; traumatized lives because of the civil conflict - on-site interviews with men who used to be fighters-, the silence due to post-war amnesia, and the collective refusal of the victims to acknowledge and punish those responsible for the war. |
Souha: Surviving Hell
Randa Chahal Sabbag
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With a sense of hope for the future - both her own and that of Lebanon-, Souha Beshara shares In this video-documentary, her story about her ten years' imprisonment in the Khiam prison -6 of which were in solitary confinement- for the attempt on the life of Lebanese General Antoine Lahad who was collaborating with the Israeli Army in the South of Lebanon. |
The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins
Jalal Toufic
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"The organic dying of a (resurrectable) human is as nothing compared to that of an animal, exemplarily of a bull in a corrida; the only phenomenon that equals in intensity the death of a bull in a corrida or of a cow in a slaughterhouse is the resurrection of a human, Lazarus coming out from the grave. The living woman in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is found settling her pillow to sleep when she encounters the undead. Why are you settling the pillow, why are you so sleepy? What disclosure are you thus trying to elude? “Tell you all,” Lazarus says in Eliot’s poem, and would that “all” not also include himself? Did Lazarus come back to tell himself about death? And did he find himself sleeping then?" |
