Beirut Phantom

"Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything as it is," wrote Maurice Blanchot. "Everything." From the southern districts of Beirut to southern Lebanon, a car winds its way through the devastated country. No title for such desolation.

In Beirut, the destinies of several thirtysomethings (an architect, a tour guide, a mystic, a radio operator, and an exile returned home) collide.

After surviving a car crash in the middle of Lebanon's isolated Beqaa Valley, an amnesiac man finds himself held hostage on a local farm that doubles as an illegal drug-production facility.

It's autumn. A man and a woman are about to leave a restaurant situated in the heart of the Lebanese mountains. They are suprised by fighter planes screaming past at low altitude. In the distance, war seems to be breaking out once more. Losing sight of the woman, the man starts looking for her. He finds her on the other side of the mountain. Together they sink deeper into nature, which becomes increasingly spectral, just like the slender thread that ties them to each other.

Following on from the 2006 Israeli aggression on Lebanon, the filmmaker tries to film the destruction of Beirut. We witness a city deserted by life, and ghostly characters who, featured in his earlier films, talk about living through such a war.

Night falls over Beirut. Fadi, a forty year old, packs his luggage and sets out to the airport with his friend driving him. He is supposed to leave for a month, but instead of going up the plane, he heads to the arrivals section and rents a car. He takes the highway heading North then continues on a mountainous route. Far from anyone, on a deserted highway, a deviation forces him to quit the main road. A distinct sound coming from far is heard; the sound of a car honk. Fadi gets closer and closer to the sound and sees a wrecked car crashed in a tree alongside the road. A couple lay still inside.

In Chinese Ink, composed from a series of shots taken with an iPhone, Salhab expands questions of location and the act of filmmaking itself. Some images were captured in the moment ‘without quite knowing why’, and others were filmed at an earlier time ‘with no apparent motive’ or as a result of specific circumstances. Salhab jotted down notes all along, excerpts from books he read or reread, sounds he recorded and preserved. He approached this film essay as a work in progress with no preconceived structure; instead, he let the work gradually reveal itself. All at once, in terms of ‘place’ and his relationship to ‘here’, with all its entanglements, it became clear to him that he needed to invoke the ‘elsewhere’, to start with the first place, his childhood in Senegal, and ‘retrace’ certain steps: his connection to armed struggles, the Palestinian cause, the present moment.

"Riverbed" tells the story of Salma and her returning daughter Thuraya, and their attempt to preserve, maintain and reconstruct their lives with and against each other. Salma survived many years by protecting her independence, she reached her peace through letting go of any attachments. But the past does not let go of Salma and brings back Thuraya, defeated, divorced, and pregnant.

A journalist and a photographer drift on their way between Beirut and Baalbeck. Their journey is repeated three times in three different ways to evoke current issues and confusion in Lebanon’s present state.

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

Rosa Luxemburg’s letters from prison form the backbone of Ghassan Salhab’s essayistic collage. Luxemburgs’s lyrical descriptions of nature bear witness to a joie de vivre undimmed by the political situation of the time and are not seen, but rather heard – in both German and Arabic. In connection with images of a wintry Berlin, a polyphony of different overlapping visual and acoustic layers is produced.

An interview with Jean-Luc Godard around the time of his film Notre Musique.

In 1975, the Lebanese wars started when Maroun Bagdadi ended his first feature film "Beirutya Beirut". Did the war give an identity to Lebanese cinema? Productions of documentaries, action movies, actor films, co-productions, and emigration. Since 1975, the war has remained a major subject for feature fiIms shot in Lebanon. This is a history of stories about war and cinema.

In 1958, in Senegal, land of emigration, Zahia Salhab gave birth to her first child Ghassan. During the same period, Lebanon, their homeland, is driven into a significant local conflict, a preamble to the next civil war.

What will you do, God, when I die? (R.M. Rilke)

Lebanon, 2019-2023: a chronicle of the uprising, its fading and its end. From collective hope to intimate pain, can cinema resist the irreversible?