AL-WADI (The Valley, Lebanon/F/G/Qatar/UAE 2014, 1.6.) A man who lost his memory in an accident becomes the prisoner of a clandestine community that manufactures drugs in the Beqaa Valley. The presence of this stranger without a past leads to tensions within the group; there is also a sense of latent violence in the vastness of the sublime landscape. Aside from radio news bulletins about current affairs and political crises, the film leaves plenty of room to painting, poems and a love song, examining the status of art in times of terror and war.
1958 (Lebanon 2009, 2.6.) 1958 was the year of Ghassan Salhab’s birth. Itwas also the year of the Lebanon crisis, the precursor of the later civil war. This multi-faceted, polyphonic essay film uses archive material and the reminiscences of Salhab’s mother, who gave birth to her son in Senegal, to combine individual and national history, the private and the geopolitical, the past and present, exile and colonialism, armed violence and poetry, by overlapping voices and images.
ATLAL (The Last Man, Lebanon/F 2006, 2.6.) Beirut is haunted by a serial killer, whose victims bear the marks of his bite and are left without blood. Khalil, a ladies man whose hobby is diving, is a doctor at the hospital where the autopsies are performed. He is strangely fascinated by the victims’bodies. Because his eyes are sensitive to light, he isolates himself increasingly and errs like a shadowy creature through the night. A vampire film about Beirut and its inhabitants –after the war and before the war. (bik)
