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- You are here: Home > SUN RAVE
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Online -
Tuesday, November 24, 2020 - 21:00
Cinematography:
Mark Khalife
Editing:
Roy Samaha
Sound:
Tatiana Gornefer el Dahdah, Ziad Moukarzel
Producer:
Karina El Helou
Production:
BeMA, Studiocu/art
Like Méliès, SAMAHA achieves his cinema with simple means. Blocks of text, displayed over images, list scientific facts about solar storms and short-wave radios which are good for listening to such storms, before the narrative becomes more personal (and possibly made-up). In first person, the film’s narrator recounts how, in the late 1980s, when he was 11, a mysterious British couple was living next door to his parents’ apartment in Lebanon. Through the walls, a woman’s voice could be heard, repeating numeric sequences, which the family took to be a spiritist ritual, but which was more likely a code. (Ela Bittencourt, Sight & Sound)
Director:
Director ROY SAMAHA is a Lebanese artist, living and working in Beirut. In much of his work he explores the boundaries of filmic language, perception of reality and the memory of personal objects and has been shown at prestigious events such as Pinacoteca Nazionale (Bologna), Disobedience Archive, Castello di Rivoli (Torino), Bildmuseet (Umea), Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst (Munich), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam), Affinités, among others.
Contact:
STUDIOCU/ART
Festivals, awards:
Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 2019 / Toronto International Film Festival 2019 / Rencontres International Paris / Berlin 2020
“In a way, SAMAHA's premise is silly, a sci-fi goof on world history à la Craig Baldwin. However, there is a melancholia coursing through SUN RAVE that only really hits you after the fact. Samaha's film is actually trying to answer a very real question. Why did the revolutions that ended the Cold War succeed, and the Arab Spring revolts fail? It can't simply be that one group of insurgents were more dedicated or more competent than the other, so Samaha is looking for a scientific answer. But of course, we know that this is pure irony. The solution doesn't lie in the Van Allen belt. One group was aided by the West, the other abandoned. Isn't Sun Rave's proposition more satisfying? If you want a less tragic explanation, there's always the sun.” (Michael Sicinski, MUBI)