Pipe Dreams

Nabil returns to Beirut with the ashes of his father who died abroad. He tries to overcome his bereavement while his family insists on respecting rites and customs by burying a non-existent corpse.

Halil spends his nights in a watchtower waiting for an enemy that doesn’t arrive, until suddenly strange lights appear on the horizon. Ali Cherri creates a universe in which a suspended and void time opens the door to ghostly presences from a past made of war. Shot with an extreme and detailed precision of vision and sound, The Watchman is an urgent film that deconstructs the myth of duty, laying bare the absurdity of the omnipresent war rhetoric.

Merowe Dam in North Sudan. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to erect a mysterious construction made of mud. Despite a disturbing wound in his lower back that seems to be eating away at his skin, he continues his labor day after day. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his mud creation starts slowly to take a life of its own.

A French soldier, gently bent at the waist, a rifle lodged in his mouth. The rifle fires. Whether he dies or dreams is left unresolved, the decision deferred to the viewer.

Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Somniculus (the Latin word for “light sleep”) articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them. Artefacts from museums of ethnography, archaeology and natural sciences are all presented in their existing cultural context as the surviving objects of human interest.

It all happened on a dark night. The Man was tired of being a stranger, tired of being insulted by others simply because he speaks Arabic to a wife who speaks French with their beloved mixed race son. He looked at the sky and shouted. But that night, far in the cosmos, a voice answered.

During the July War of 2006, as warships evacuated foreigners and dual-nationality Lebanese, the “State of Israel” intercepted the broadcast of The Voice of the People radio station to deliver an audio message to Lebanese citizens. Israel interrupts the broadcast of "Sawt Al-Sha'eb," as Fairuz finishes performing Talal Haidar's poem "Wahdun" (They Alone) and starts singing another verse in which she declares her eternal love for Lebanon. Meanwhile, ships are evacuating those fleeing the flames of war—three enormous contradictions. Coincidence can carry so much meaning.

In a cyclical structure from dark to light, this film is a reflection on growing up in Beirut during the civil war years and adapting to the "post war" life: accepting the body that is in ruin, and learning to live in the city that is always already in ruin.