There has been much discussion in certain cultural milieus in Beirut about All this Victory (Ar: Jidār al-Sawt, trans: The Sound Barrier). Since I’m one of the few people who’ve seen the film and am in constant conversation with the director, Ahmad Ghossein, and despite preferring absolute silence so that any articles or debates come after having watched the film; but out of respect for writers who we like, and... more

Syrians won’t be hurt by some filmmaker borrowing images of their suffering as a metaphor so as to make images of his own personal or collective suffering. Ahmed Ghossein won’t be the first in this regard, nor will he be the last. Ultimately cinema, like all art, is merely a copy of an original. The fundamental problem with Ahmed Ghossein’s film was and will be that he borrowed an original... more

In 2017, the artist Ahmed Ghossein presented works in Marfa’ Gallery in Beirut entitled There is No Right or Wrong Here (Arabic: al-arḍ li-man yuḥarriruhā, trans: The Land Belongs to Whoever Liberates it), in which he discusses the real estate situation in South Lebanon through the story of his father who acquired a parcel of land simply by laying his hands on it and declaring that it was his property.... more

The case began with a piece of gossip or info that spread by whispers, mixed here with sarcasm and there with a sort of ‘moralizing’ surprise… “Did Ahmad really go to Syria to film?” …The question spread and the circle in-the-know widened, as did those who were expected to take a stance from a friend who went to Syria to capture a few scenes of destruction. Bit by bit, gossip... more

In the film Recollection (2015), the Palestinian director Kamal Jafari gathers all the Israeli and American films filmed in his hometown, Jaffa. He breaks them down into thousands of images, and then proceeds to efface the images of the actors so that only the city of Jaffa and its inhabitants remain. This was the director’s way to seek revenge, in a manner of speaking; Revenge for his hometown which has... more

It’s becoming increasingly common for filmmakers to use the houses and neighbourhoods of destroyed and displaced Syrian towns and cities as locations for films sponsored and encouraged by the Syrian regime and its allies.   After being granted permission by the military authorities controlling these neighbourhoods, they become sets for a wide range of filmmakers who burst with their film crews into those places with their cameras, ignoring the raw recent memories... more

Un vaste champ de ruines, de toutes sortes et de tout temps. De tout temps d’homme, ou du moins de toute civilisation, quelle qu’elle soit. Et notre champ « méditerranéen-mésopotamien » n’y échappe point, loin s’en faut, très loin s’en faut. Cela se poursuit sans relâche, à l’est comme à l’ouest, au sud comme au nord, à la périphérie et au centre de cet infernal cercle. Des ruines qui aujourd’hui viennent quasi... more

“Are they expecting another wave from Russia?” Shadi sarcastically asks his father as they drive past a block of blandly designed Jewish Settlements. This is one of the few direct mentions of the Zionist colonial project in Annemarie Jacir’s latest film Wajib (2017). For the most part, the plot of the film is quite reduced. It follows the very simple story of a Palestinian expatriate who returns home to Nazareth... more

  “Immaterial Collection,” a cinematic activity and event has been held in Beirut Art Center since 2015. Each part of the event deals with a different subject and a collection of cinematic performances pertaining to that subject is selected, and films are produced by artists that wish to participate. This month, and in the tenth part of “Immaterial Collection” the organizers have directed their interest towards presenting Syrian films, and three... more

A year after the warlords’ agreement in Taif, Saudi Arabia, the Lebanese civil war officially ended in 1990, with the Syrian regime seizing control of the presidential palace in Baabda and General Michel Aoun fleeing to his exile in France.   This is what we have read in newspapers and books, and what we have been seeing on television shows and documentaries. In reality, however, and more than twenty-eight years after its... more

It has been seven years since demonstrators in downtown Cairo first cried out to demand the fall of the regime. The city was both background and witness to this event. It is a witness to the individual’s disappearance within a tsunami of crowds, and the capacity for memory seems to serve as a reel of film, capable of recording millions of hours in endless detail. The truth was timeless, embroiled... more

“In 1970, this film was called Victory. In 1974, this film is called Here and Elsewhere.” With these words, in his own voice, Jean-Luc Godard opens his quasi-documentary Here and Elsewhere, emphasizing the conjunction “and” which separates the two places. He does this in pronunciation, repetition and simply by showing the letter on the screen in 3D and fixing it for a few seconds. Of course, this emphasis is not an absurd... more

Syrians waited about four decades before screaming out against Assad’s regime. After this outcry there can be no going back to silence. The people were fed up with murders, forced disappearances, dictatorship, political and social repression, and overwhelming psychological pressure on the individual. Thus they were not fully aware of what waiting would mean, or of what would follow it. Their will was somehow anesthetized, or they were only partially... more

Translation by Stefan Tarnowski     During my five years of research on the uses and grammars of video in the context of revolt then war in Syria, many images have touched me, overwhelmed me. Others have shocked me, wounded me. And yet out of this visual, aural and emotional accumulation, three videos stand out. They permeate my memory and my thought. Each inscribed in its own way in a grey, intermediate zone,... more

  The voice messages as well as the Skype conversations with the parents and sister of the director of On the Edge of Life (Yaser Kassab, 2017) mingle with void: that of the static landscapes of the Turkish countryside and that of the road when leaving Beirut. Then appears a figure of the absence.  It corresponds as much to that of the relatives – namely the brother who disappeared, killed by... more

  The meaning of words no longer had the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought fit. Reckless doing was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Thucydides on the corruption of language during the revolution at Corfu in Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics     The question comes to... more

  The visual artist Azadeh Akhlaghi began documenting death in the wake of the 2009 uprising, when thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the results of the presidential elections. She was particularly moved by the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, whose killing was captured on video and circulated widely. The visual documentation of unfathomable injustice, she thought, allowed supporters of the uprising to visualize and ultimately mourn their unfulfilled... more

  On Samira al-Khalil’s Diaries of Seige in Douma (in Arabic). Al-Mousaasah al-Arabiyya lil Dirasat wal Nashr, 2016.   Samira has disappeared. Here is her book on my bed. I looked for Samira al-Khalil’s book in four bookstores in Beirut. Then, I sent her husband Yassin al-Hajj Saleh a Facebook message to help me locate a copy. That is when I discovered that he had bought all the copies, effectively taking the book... more

  I am Sara Jamil, I am not Tina Modotti, and I know nothing about the revolution.             On Good Friday April 22 2011 I saw people dressed in grey. Their eyes were like the eyes of good wolves that lost their will years ago. The clamour was like a moaning, an echo refracted from the sleeping, waking mountain: “Freedom…Freedom.” The Syrian regime is aghast. Fear of the regime is its omnipotence,... more

  The horizon splits the frame, a third of which unfolds destroyed cement buildings and then merges into the ruins. In the remaining two-thirds, purple-tinted clouds sink in the buildings immersed in black. The frame follows a path that leads to the destroyed buildings. From the depth of the ruins, a woman emerges. She’s wearing a black coat and a patterned veil and holding a bouquet of chrysanthemums. In slow steps,... more

  A girl in a white gown. We don’t see her face. On the bride’s right side stands another girl pinning her hair. Another pair of hands: one hand reaches out while the other holds the tip of the bride’s hair. In their midst there is an ordinary guy, probably in his forties, holding the back zipper of the dress. The closest character is indistinct; she, too, is wearing a white... more

  In black and white, the man in the picture clutches the truck window. He is charred. For some reason, the flames could not entirely erase his features, so it looks as though he is grinding his teeth, attempting to escape the burning vehicle. But fire was quicker and stronger, confining him as he wrestled with death until the last breath.   The man is an Iraqi soldier whose picture was taken on... more

  On July 2, 2016, the Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel died. As fate would have it, he witnessed in his lifetime another Holocaust; similar to the one he survived.   Although Wiesel is barely remembered, his death in 2016 reminds us that there have been major devastations, the danger and scale of which speak to what is happening today.   There are several... more

  On their rafts plowing waters and waves, the escapees embark. Throughout their sea adventure, they forge their exterior. The deeper they penetrate it, the more it widens; the more they traverse it, the more it unfolds. At sea, they withdraw to themselves, beginning their lives on sweeping flowing land on which they live their seclusion. The sea grants them seclusion that allows them to navigate and conquer it by moving... more

  The picture in which Aylan Shenu appears reveals a glaring conundrum: From which direction did the child touch the shore? If from the sea, his corpse seems to deny it because it faces the water; if from the mainland, his wet clothes serve as a further reminder that their wearer died drowned.   The child touched the shore from both directions simultaneously, for he travelled land and sea and fell in their... more

  Seven-thirty exactly   The camp’s streets lie utterly bare, nothing relieving the loneliness of these ruined walls piled one atop the other like books tossed down unread. The plants that have sprouted and grown in the middle of the road, they made the place more desolated, like some additional sign that much time has passed since anyone last came here. Even the cats have abandoned this street.   In the distance the sun... more

  In the digital information age, examining this image (which constituted a major humanitarian event the minute it was released) is an attempt to analyse the image’s relationship with the social reality of a given group of people, with political events, and to understand the potential trajectories of the image within the media, while avoiding the dictates of the fast news cycle and the emotionalism of immediate response. The photograph of... more

  The sky fell. The rusty fragments of metal rent air thick with the reek of bodies burnt by artillery fire and napalm. The buildings, warring with the thickets of lance-like rifles, groaned in the pitch-black night, alive with the endless screams of people who could find no way to live save tearing one another to pieces.   The sky dropped earthwards with the falling barrel, the distance between it and the machine... more

  The crowds fill the foreground, a river of thin bodies, faces packed between two parallel, receding lines of ruined buildings. The closest face is that of an elderly woman, wearing black shawl on her head. I’ve never seen an exhausted face with quite this kind of parched fatigue before. It is an epic image, it could be a canvas by some great artist, but the truth is it is just... more

    That day, just after noon, as I was on my way to the cigarette stall (a small table, chairs, a few packs of cigarette of two or three brands, all of them open because they are sold singly) the heavens rang. It was the whistling again, the sound that had begun to play on my nerves, the huge hit of adrenalin freezing everything, even time. The sound of an aircraft,... more

  Since the start of the Syrian revolution, debate has raged over the importance of the image, its potency and the different ways by which one can engage with it. In this article, we attempt to participate in this debate from a different angle: dealing with the power of the image, its aims, its audience and the ease (or difficulty) of accessing it, by reference to what is technically known as... more

Faubourg de Damas, Jobar a connu, lors des premiers mois de la révolution syrienne, en 2011, des dizaines de manifestations pacifiques, réprimées dans la sang. Passée aux mains de l'opposition en novembre 2012 cette ville de la Ghouta orientale est bombardée depuis lors par le régime. Depuis avril 2014, le régime d'Assad, soutenu par des combattants du Hezbollah libanais, multiplie les offensives pour la reprendre, sans succès pour le moment.     J'étais à deux doigts... more

  I almost fell out of the vehicle! We were sitting in the back of a small pick-up, we three and two large pots of cooked rice. The closer we got to the sign that read Jawbar: Only Entrance the more the twenty-year old behind the wheel drove like he was in the final stages of a rally race. This was the most heavily bombarded point in the district: not five... more

DOUMA—We have lost sight of the outside world, a gift that other people take for granted. Our universe has become so small and shattered. "The universe starts in Al-Mleiha and ends in Douma," Abo Mahmoud told me one night, referring to two of the suburbs in our besieged world of East Ghouta, a conurbation just outside Damascus. Time slipped by as we sat his dim room, illuminated only by a... more

I still remember—way back in the mists of the distant past—that warm feeling when I first picked up a camera. As though I was experiencing a prophecy that one day I would use this instrument until I wore it away to nothing. Back then I carried it like a sceptre; today I bear the camera like a shield. Today, I remember the first time I literally did this—bore it like... more

Kulturgespräch 5.2.2014 Filme als Hoffnungsträger Cristin Lüttich von der Hilfsorganisation Bidayyat über die Arbeit syrischer Dokumentarfilmer Zuletzt waren es Fassbomben. Von Hubschraubern abgeworfen rasen sie unaufhaltsam auf die Erde zu und schlagen in Wohnhäusern ein. Wir kennen so viele furchtbare Bilder aus Syrien, dass wir aufgehört haben, sie zu zählen und wegschauen, schon wegen des Gefühls der eigenen Hilflosigkeit. Und so stehen diejenigen, die bis heute über den syrischen Bürgerkrieg berichten, vor der... more