Ashes

One of the most popular Lebanese films of the late 1990s, Around the Pink House is a story that explores the changing urban landscape of Beirut after the Civil War. La maison rose (the pink house) is an old mansion in Beirut where the Nawfal family found shelter during the Civil War. Unfortunately for them, their immediate environment is rapidly changing, as many of the old shell-ridden buildings are being torn down and replaced by new construction projects. When Mattar, the owner of the pink house, decides to sell it to make room for a large commercial centre, the residents of the neighbourhood become divided between the shopkeepers and businessmen in favour of a different kind of modernity.

A day in the life of Malek, a young man who suffers from sleep disorders and is obsessed with thoughts of his ex-girlfriend. Meanwhile, his overprotective mother struggles with the disappearance of her husband, who was kidnapped more than 15 years ago during the civil war.

Lebanon's brief flirtation with space travel in the 1960s becomes a poignant metaphor for the Arab world's utopian dreams in this riveting documentary.

Maia, a single mother, lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex. On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected delivery: notebooks, tapes, and photos Maia, from 13 to 18 years old, sent from Beirut to her best friend who left for Paris to escape the civil war. Maia refuses to open the box or confront its memories, but Alex secretly begins diving into it. Between fantasy and reality, Alex enters the world of her mother’s tumultuous, passionate adolescence during the Lebanese civil war, unlocking mysteries of a hidden past.

Six stories, six films that follow on from each other; this is a glance at the childhood of renowned directors whose style has marked the history of film. A group of young directors focus their cameras on the story of these filmmakers, these childhood stories that sometimes shape an entire life and thus shed light on their cinematic works. The stories overlap to merge into one film about childhood, filled with emotional wounds, frustrations and encounters.

July 2006. Another war breaks out in Lebanon. The directors decide to follow a movie star, Catherine Deneuve and a friend, actor and artist Rabih Mroue;, on the roads of South Lebanon. Together, they will drive through the regions devastated by the conflict. It is the beginning of an unpredictable, unexpected adventure...

Nowadays, Beirut is often deprived of electricity. It is not a one-time accident but a new state. In the national museum, visitors find themselves in darkness and use their phones to light the traces of past civilizations as their world crumbles.

Paris, May 8, 2020. Two days before the end of the lockdown in France. We try to follow the path filmed by Marguerite Duras in Les mains négatives years ago. We are deprived of movement, of unexpected encounters, of freedom, of cinema… “You who have a name, who have been given an identity, I love you with an indefinite love,” said she.

The first part filmed in 1999, completed in 2000, up until the liberation of the South of Lebanon in May 2000, it was impossible to go to Khiam detention camp, located in an area under israeli occupation and its proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army. The second part: Video filmed in 2007, After the liberation of the South in 2000, the Khiam detention camp was transformed into a museum. It was completely destroyed during the israeli war on Lebanon in July 2006.

This film is from the project Unconformities, comprised of artworks made up from the material of surveyed land, extracted from coring construction sites in Paris, Athens and Beirut. These cores bare their "unconformities"—temporal ruptures, natural disasters, geological movements—in full view, revealing a constant cycle of construction and deconstruction that is the defining feature of civilisations past and present, with each using the stones of the last. History appears not as layers but as actions, a kind of palimpsest mixing epochs and civilizations. These poetic recompositions question the dominant forms of narrating and representing history, but also address debates around the Anthropocene.

Joana Hadjithomas and the artist and poet Etel Adnan met fifteen years ago. They quickly became close, sharing a city that they had never been to: Smyrna, in Turkey. Joana’s paternal Greek family were forced into exile from Smyrna by the Turkish armies after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Etel’s Greek mother was also born in Smyrna and was married to a Syrian officer of the Ottoman Army and exiled in Lebanon after the fall of the empire. Etel and Joana have both lived in an imaginary Smyrna, today called Izmir, without ever setting foot there. Nowadays they are confronted with the transmission of history and trauma, questioning their attachment to objects, places, imaginary constructions and mythologies without images. What is to be done with the sorrow of our parents? Their personal experiences, their stories serve as a background to the region’s changes after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the evolution of the borders questioning the notion of identity and belonging.

A copy of the filmmakers' first feature film disappeared somewhere in Yemen on the 10th anniversary of the reunification of north and south. A year later, they returned to track down the print, embarking on a journey that would take them across forbidding terrain from Sana to Aden. What they discover is a land of contradictions where film is openly reviled and secretly loved, teaching them much about their status as filmmakers in the Middle East.