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Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Thursday, March 29, 2018 - 21:00
Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Sunday, April 1, 2018 - 15:30
Cast:
Ibtissam Malak, Hassan el-Jeshi, Rahif Fayad
Cinematography:
Sandra Schäfer
Editing:
Sandra Schäfer
Sound:
Martin Ehlers-Falkenberg, Sandra Boutros
Production:
Sandra Schäfer, Ekaterina Degot
Romanian Premiere
The architecture of post-war reconstruction is always something profoundly ideological, almost as violent as the destruction of war itself. Such is the case of the architecture that arose in Lebanon after the wars of the last decades, whose visual politics are questioned by filmmaker Sandra Schäfer in her project Constructed Futures. Her video Haret Hreik visits the neighbourhood where Hezbollah has its headquarters and supporter base – bombed extensively during the 2006 war with Israel, but rebuilt to be “even more beautiful”. It traces the rebuilding’s visions and concept, analysing its production of space and its construction of memory. (Videoex International Experimentalfilm & Video Festival Zürich, Switzerland)
Director:
Contact:
mazefilm[at]gmx[dot]net
Festivals, awards:
- Berlin International Film Festival 2017
- Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest 2017
- Diagonale - Festival of Austrian Film Graz 2018
- Duisburger Filmwoche 2017
- FemAgenda und Kunsthochschule Bern 2017
- Contemporary Image Collective Cairo 2017
Curatorial comment:
The Shiite dominated neighborhood Haret Hreik in Beirut houses the headquarters of the Hezbollah Party, invisible to the outside. In 2006 the Israeli Army bombarded the neighborhood, which Hezbollah then quickly rebuilt. This rebuilding project is part of a military conflict and a geopolitical network in which architecture takes part in the production of space, landscape, and memory. The video installation shows offices where the reconstruction was planned and designed, one of the rebuilt houses itself, as well as a hall where Hezbollah sympathizers regularly gather to attend video addresses by the party leader Hassan Nasrallah. What does it mean when new buildings are meant to be added without rupture or break into the existing urban structure and into individual memories? How has the interpretation of resistance by Hezbollah become a dominant project that is manifest spatially? What does building mean if it leaves no room for ruins and commemoration, because it thinks in a logic of brief intervals of warlessness? (Berlinale Forum Expanded)
The Shiite dominated neighborhood Haret Hreik in Beirut houses the headquarters of the Hezbollah Party, invisible to the outside. In 2006 the Israeli Army bombarded the neighborhood, which Hezbollah then quickly rebuilt. This rebuilding project is part of a military conflict and a geopolitical network in which architecture takes part in the production of space, landscape, and memory. The video installation shows offices where the reconstruction was planned and designed, one of the rebuilt houses itself, as well as a hall where Hezbollah sympathizers regularly gather to attend video addresses by the party leader Hassan Nasrallah. What does it mean when new buildings are meant to be added without rupture or break into the existing urban structure and into individual memories? How has the interpretation of resistance by Hezbollah become a dominant project that is manifest spatially? What does building mean if it leaves no room for ruins and commemoration, because it thinks in a logic of brief intervals of warlessness? (Berlinale Forum Expanded)