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Nadim Asfar |
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In the Honour of Lebanon
Wednesday July 4th 2007
During the festival, the films from the Lebanese programme were shown at the Filmothèque Quartier Latin, a movie theatre located in the heart of Paris, two steps away from the Sorbonne. Wednesday July 4th, two short films were shown. Together, they make up a testimony to the diversity and vitality of Lebanese cinema today. Two directors, among others, presented their films in an open and informal manner: Jean-Noël Aoun, co-director of Dancing Was the Only Way to Avoid Deafness and Nadim Asfar, director of Empreinte (1).
Dancing was the Only Way to Avoid Deafness takes place in a deserted street at night, in Beirut. The actor and director explained that the film was shot on July 12th 2006, when the war had just broken out. The street is terrifying and ghostly – yet it is one of the main thoroughfares of the city. In showing this deserted street, Jean-Noël Aoun wanted to testify to how much “everyday life has changed drastically”, “every detail of it”. He speaks of some sort of sudden amnesia: “We have forgotten what our days were like before the war started”. When he saw his film again, some time after the editing job was finished, he realized everything that could not be said, but that one could nonetheless see in his film. His conclusion was a quote by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “You can't make a film about war”.
As for Nadim Asfar, he is an eclectic artist. Initially a photographer, his film Empreinte (1) offers a slideshow of his private and public life, as family stories and shared history interweave and interact. How did he come up with the idea for this project? He explains that he started it without thinking about anything in particular. He had already immortalized his life with photographs, and looking through the ones from 2005, he felt the urge to tell the story of these very eventful times – a year during which he fell in love, lost his sister, a time when he and his friends enthusiastically thought they were starting a revolution, and when he started taking pictures under women's skirts... The making of the film, a slide show of labelled photographs, was very quick – “20 minutes”, he said – and indeed, one feels in this film how urgently he needed to confide in somebody, while the feelings and memories were still fresh. Nadim Asfar says he seems to have found a very personal means of expression that reconciles photography and cinema.
These two directors are an illustration of how Paris Cinema was able to cast light on the terrific diversity in Lebanese cinematographic creation today, and also on the common culture that underlies it.
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