The Land Was Well Past its Zenith
Qumra Projects
/ Short Experimental or Essay / Lebanon, Qatar
In Arabic
Rated: This film has not been rated.
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Synopsis
The film is a short experimental essay that wanders the streets of Beirut in 2024, five years after the beginning of the (ongoing and worsening) economic crisis and four years after the port explosion, the repercussions of which are still visible today. Crafting non-familiar recording techniques, the film proposes new ways to capture space on film. It recreates traditional non-perspectival painting while employing imagery of modern warfare instruments. Combining multi-perspectival elements into one image, it reflects on a city that has been abundantly filmed, surveilled, and mediatised.
The film documents everyday life and urban textures of Beirut in the aftermath of the 2019-20 crises. However, it’s less interested in representing the city as a post-traumatic space than in delineating the hidden political structures that made such disasters possible. In fact, what perpetuated and remained hidden since the end of the civil war, the status quo of the apparent functioning of a political and economic model that lasted for thirty years, has been ‘exposed’ in 2019-2020. The film seeks to reconcile the city with its photographic representation by similarly ‘exposing’ the hidden structures of the camera as an apparatus—as changing topographies require the foundational adjustment of modes of representation.