Film in the Mini Cinema

Film programme 1

This Day (2003), 86 min
This video essay was recorded in Lebanon, Syria and Jordania. In the film Akram Zaatari uses video and photography to examine how photographic images circulate in the historically charged Middle East.

Film programme 2

Total playing time: 54 min

Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright (2010), 12 min
In the video, two men who were separated ten years earlier express their longing for each other. A typewriter taps out messages between the two lovers – a parallel to today’s modern chats. Zaatari relates to film and literature: Jules Verne and The Green Ray, and the filmmaker Eric Rohmer who made a film with the same title. The green ray of light can arise after sunset or before sunrise and is said to bring good luck and love to those who see it.

Red Chewing Gum (2000), 10 min

The narrator returns to the scene of an accident that took place many years ago on Hamra Street, in the commercial centre of Beirut. Together with his lover, and to the sound of gun shots, he goes up an alley where a young peddler is chewing the red gum he was supposed to sell.

Her + Him Van Leo (2001), 32 min

This work combines photography and video to document 1940s and 1950s photography from a critical perspective. The film is set in the studio of an aging photographer in Egypt, who is interviewed about his approach to photography. The discussion comes to concern the changes in the art of photography over time, but also Egypt’s social and political history over the past 50 years.

Film programme 3

Total playing time: 84 min

All is Well on the Border (1997), 43 min

A film in three parts, featuring three interviews with captured resistance fighters about their experiences during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Nature Morte (2008), 11 minAn elderly man makes explosives, a younger man mends a jacket. No words are exchanged between them. Prayer calls are heard from a nearby mosque. The relationship between the men remains implicit. The elderly man leaves the room with rifle, rucksack and his lunch in a plastic bag, and the mended jacket. The younger man chooses to stay behind.

In This House (2005), 30 min

The city of Ain el Mir was situated on the frontier between Israel and Lebanon in the late 1980s. For seven years, Lebanese rebels occupied a house in Ain el Mir. One of the occupiers, Ali Hashisho, wrote a letter after the war, justifying their occupation and welcoming the real owners back to their house. He buried his letter in the garden. In the film, Zaatari documents the story of this letter.