Pressure Points: Screening Program
Jalal Toufic
Saving Face
8 min.
Were all the candidates’ faces posted on the walls of Lebanon during the parliamentary campaign of 2000 waiting for the results of the elections? No. As faces, they were waiting to be saved. Far better than any surgical face-lift or digital retouching, it was the physical removal of part of the poster of the face of one candidate so that the face of another candidate would partially appear under it; as well as the accretions of posters and photographs over each other that produced the most effective face-lift, and that proved a successful face-saver for all concerned. We have in these resultant recombinant posters one of the sites where Lebanese culture in specific, and Arabic culture in general, mired in an organic view of the body, in an organic body, exposes itself to inorganic bodies.
The Lamentations Series: The Ninth Night and Day
60 min.
It would be felicitous were a Shi‘ite to make the first great film or video on the lamentation of Judas Iscariot during the interval between his delivering Jesus to the chief priests and his hanging himself. Judas had prearranged the following signal for the large crowd armed with swords and clubs that was sent with him by the chief priests and the elders of the people to apprehend Jesus: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.” Given that Jesus had told his disciples, among whom figured Judas, “If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also” (Luke 6:29), why didn’t the one who was kissed by Judas turn the other cheek for another (perfidious) kiss?,1 responding instead with: “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48)? Given that Judas did not sin against the Holy Spirit but only against the Son of Man (“Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” [Matthew 12:32]), and given that the Son of Man had walked on water, healed the blind, and resurrected the dead, why didn’t the one who was kissed by Judas miraculously move time backward till before the birth of his betrayer (“woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born” [Matthew 26:24]) in forgiveness? If the one who was perfidiously kissed by Judas did neither, was this because he was not actually Jesus Christ.
Lina Saneh
I Had a Dream, Mom
45 min.
Robert Abirached has often told me that it is in the effervescence of the irrational, caught at the most intimate point of individual experience, that one must perhaps seek an alternative humanism, that is, a possible basis for a different order.
One day, one night, rather, I had a dream; I recount it to my mother; she understands. She throws the ball back in my court; I fail to catch it…
Mireille & Fabian Astore
3494 Houses + 1 fence
6 min.
Houses: neat, some pretty, some with children playing in front, collide with sounds made elsewhere, in a foreign land, far away from here. From the viewing platform of past realities, Broken Hill “the accessible outback” town of Australia is woven into a tapestry of morality, memory and experience. There, exponential repetition sets apathy on a collision course with fear. Mangled silences interrupt – but only to disrupt the remnants of illusion and safe living that send eidetic shock waves through rose coloured lenses. The question of responsibility then emerges to demand, if not an answer, then a pause for grief, for consideration due to the boundaries of the senses and the centrality of the body’s – any-body’s – pain and sorrow.
Khaled Sabsabi
Ali or Úli
11 min.
‘Ali or Úli’ image / sound combined transcends life from beginning to End!? Conformity rather than separation of identities.
Khaled D. Ramadan
Wide power
12 min.
Wide Power is about the lens, representation and reminiscence. A visual dialog between the self and the Other and the struggle for or against self-representation. The narrative addresses the notion of visual authority and the risk of the historically colonized other adopting the colonial gaze himself or herself.
Khaled D. Ramadan, who grew up in the midst of the Lebanese civil war’s mayhem remembers the French soldiers asking him and his friends to pose in front of their lenses. Ramadan questions the fate of these photographs and how they would’ve been viewed and read by the French soldiers or by anyone years later. As a video maker and photographer Ramadan sees parallels between images of himself taken in Lebanon and the images he takes of others.
Jayce Salloum
untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends..
11 min.
An homage to the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacre, a reflection on the past, its present context and forbearance. Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan recounts a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. A elegiac response working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically.
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