Director of Photography
A prospective wish is announced at the very beginning: "Imagine a land without ownership". Ownership? Since when? How? Where? With which implications? This is what Marwa Arsanios endeavours to discover in the fourth part of her meticulous ongoing project whose generic title is Who Is Afraid of Ideology? After documenting feminist experiments of community autonomy in Lebanon, Kurdistan and Syria (Who Is Afraid of Ideology? I&II, FID 2019), Marwa Arsanios ventures a hypothesis in the form of speculative fiction, from a remote piece of land in Lebanon, a cut in a stone quarry. In this small piece of land, a few sidekicks make that postulate, and slowly share stories of domination and exploitation. This land has a complicated administrative, legal, geological and biological history. (Nicolas Feodoroff - FIDMarseille)
Camera Operator
The apocalyptic blast in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4, 2020, exacerbates anger at those in power: protests cross religious boundaries as the Lebanese people curse corruption, nepotism, gross economic mismanagement and squandering of resources. How did the Land of Cedars, a country with so much to offer, allow itself to get into such a dire situation? And will it be able to bounce back?
Cinematography
Considering himself a reincarnation of a dead soldier, historian Bassel Abi Chahine has the remarkable ability to recall details from the Lebanese civil war, which mostly took place before his lifetime. Standing in front of the projected photographs from his personal collection, Abi Chahine embodies the suppressed trauma hidden to his generation.
Cinematography
A symbolic and poetic video evoking a changing situation through female body swimming in the sea.