Lebanon

In his highly acclaimed Waves '98, winner of the Palme d'or at Cannes in 2015, Ely Dagher deconstructs his love-hate relationship with his home city, in a beautiful self-reflective piece of filmmaking.  Shots of live action are employed together with several types of animation techniques to tell the story of Omar, whose experience of living in segregated post civil war Beirut adds to the inherent turmoils that harrow any teenager. Quotidian expeditions up the rooftop of his school reveal yet the same grim view of a city drenched in despair and uncertainty, parts of which he is not even allowed to tread. Until the day a giant golden elephant turns up drifting in the sky. Sucked into the giant's belly, Omar discovers - and the viewer with him, a world he never knew even existed. It may be a hopeful version of the city that takes shape in Omar's imagination. At times, it  shatters to pieces, but the fragments come together again. Eventually, the dream comes to an end, and, above a city of a less grim appearance, a golden elephant floats gently away. (Adina Marin, BIEFF)

This video reflects on the role of the subtitle, what details get lost in translation, and the weighted influence created in the juxtaposition between an image and its subtitle. For Purple, Bodies in Translation… the image is defined by what is heard––subtitled voices woven together with threads sampled from stories, poems, songs––all addressing the poetics of purple as a feeling. This video is part of an ongoing project on how we render the ever expanding militarized tones, colors, and language, on both a physical and metaphysical level.

Winner of the Tiger and Audience Awards at Rotterdam and 25 FPS respectively, Rubber Coated Steel is a forensic procedural that revisits the trial against two Israeli soldiers accused of killing teenagers Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher. Within the space of a shooting gallery, waveforms from video recordings are analyzed to prove that live ammunition was employed – instead of rubber bullets. Through the deafening silence of subtitled court transcripts, we read on as the prosecution makes its case and witness the reductive (in)ability of legal proceedings (and its jargon) to assert The Truth. Redeeming the humanity splintered by statistical evidence, Lawrence Abu Hamdan delivers a sobering look at the imbalance of systems of power and their victims. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2018)

A Qatari town’s colorful architecture replicates that of Venice, Italy. But here, the buildings are empty, and the canal’s waters are still. A filmmaker ventures to peek behind the town’s mysterious facades. Turtles Are Always Home is an intimate exploration about the search for home in a transient world. (Chicago Film Festival)
 
This is a short essay about the meaning of home and and the search for it in a transient environment. It is a personal journey inwards with an intimate camera that observes and takes its time to look at the buildings and the surroundings only to find its reflections. (Rawane Nassif)

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)

Winner of the TEDDY Award at Berlinale, MONDIAL 2010 is a heart-breaking and deeply insightful musing on love, identity and the borders that restrain and define them. A Lebanese gay couple decides to take a road trip to Ramallah and we experience their journey first-person through the camera lens. Meeting their friends, sight-seeing at the West-Bank wall or simply observing the city as it zooms past the lens, are seen from a privileged perspective that looks beyond the travel-diary surface of the footage, to unravel a disheartening narrative drama. The politics of identity and its complexity have never been so achingly expressed. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)