Bidoun Presents:

Borhane Alaouié

LETTER FROM A TIME OF EXILE / LETTRE D’UN TEMPS D’EXIL
1988, 52 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.
Scripted by Najwa Barakat and shot in a pseudo-documentary style, LETTER FROM A TIME OF EXILE presents the stories of four Lebanese men whose lives have taken unexpected turns due to the Civil War: Abdallah, a former militia member, Karim, an unemployed journalist living in Paris, Rizkallah, a car salesman in Brussels, and Nessim, a surgeon who came to Strasbourg. Narrated with subtle humor, LETTER FROM A TIME OF EXILE is both a portrait of people in exile, and the cities in which they currently reside.

“Borhane Alaouié is a topographer, he films the places. Like all of the people who chose to live elsewhere, he knows what a place means.” –Serge Daney

Akram Zaatari

ALL IS WELL ON THE BORDER / AL SHAREET BI-KHAYR
1997, 44 min, video. In Arabic with English subtitles.
Focusing on the Israeli occupation of the South, ALL IS WELL is an early example of Zaatari’s explorations into postwar Lebanese memory culture through the collection of testimonies and documents. Working at a television station at the time, Zaatari was particularly interested in the ways in which histories of resistance were mediated and exploited in their dissemination. In ALL IS WELL, Zaatari centers his own mediation by having genuine testimonies and letters from imprisoned fighters read by actors, revealing their teleprompters and script pages on screen. ALL IS WELL is an attempt to present an image of resistance and incarceration without valorization or objectification of suffering.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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