The family theme has always been at the heart of the cinema industry. Family relationships are among the most complex and challenging relationships one deals with throughout one's life.Since its beginnings, documentary cinema has been presenting family settings. For filmmakers, family issues are the raw material for plots and intrigues that support their creative directorial work.The documentary film industry overflows with intimate family matters, especially in the contemporary Lebanese documentary landscape. Some directors make intimate films for themselves above all, presenting them to an audience that their personal stories could touch.
For several years, Arab film has opened up a more spacious space for private and intimate topics, and we often sense the audience's familiarity with that. Filmmakers who choose to tackle such issues experience self-search that helps them dig deep into personal, sensitive, and sometimes complex topics.In this month's programming, we invite you to discover a group of selected Lebanese documentaries through which you can immerse yourself in the intimacy of the familial frame.
In his documentary ‘’104 Wrinkles’’, filmmaker Hady Zaccak paints a moving portrait of his grandmother Henriette, who died at the age of 104.For many years, the director follows his grandmother's life, witnessing the transformation of her memory, her immigration from Lebanon to Brazil, and stories of love, childhood, and time lost. The film reconstructs the family record through her image, tracing her path and resorting to a private archive while relating the socio-cultural history in Lebanon.
‘’104 Wrinkles’’ pays tribute to the grandmother but also carries an anthem about life. It is a film that refuses to be forgotten and contemplates life, death, love, and the passing of time. On the one hand, the film discusses the relationship between aging and memory, a theme that Zaccak often repeats in his films. On the other hand, it emphasizes the filmmaker's keen interest in history and archives.
Besides Zaccak, two other filmmakers attempt to portray the father's image.
In her documentary “All About My Father’’, Zeina Sfeir honors her father, who used to run a luxurious barbershop where he welcomed politicians, princes, and other dignitaries.Elie Sfeir is a notable person in his own right. Throughout his career, he has encountered all the Lebanese and Arab political figures. Through his experience and stories, he recounts the history of Beirut before and during the war.Zeina Sfeir grew up listening to the stories her father used to tell. In front of his daughter's camera, and based on a personal experience, the father narrates the history of Lebanon, full of exciting and innovative stories, so much as they become a historical archive.
The father-daughter relationship appears again in the short film “My Father Looks Like Abdel Nasser” by Farah Kassem. The film depicts a combination of joy, sadness, and nostalgia for memories.
Mustafa, a poet from an obsolete generation, suffers from sleep disturbances. His daughter, filmmaker Farah Kassem, who visits him regularly, depicts his life, poetry, and the memories surrounding him since his wife's death. In the intimacy of Mustafa's whispered stories, the director searches for answers to questions she never dared to ask. She begins to unravel new sides of her father's personality inside their Tripolitan home, the nest of many memories. Farah is a bold explorer who untangles the deep feelings overburdening her and her father since her mother's death.
Farah seems to gradually infiltrate the film from behind her camera, slowly leaving the role of the director to turn into the main character who plays the role of mediator between the characters of the father and the mother, whose absence remains painful.
Ghassan Salhab's documentary “1958”, which can be described as a poetic experimental film, is inspired by two main events of his life: his birth in Senegal, the country that welcomed his parents, and the growing tension in Lebanon, his parents' homeland, one that seems to be preparing for an imminent civil war.The director's personal history intersects with the country's general history, intertwining themes of exile, colonialism, politics, and linguistic diversity. Salhab's film is also an ode to mothers. A mother, in that case, whose face emanates stories from Lebanon and Senegal, in a metaphorical spin of the motherland and the mother language.
In “Diaries of a Flying Dog” by Bassem Fayyad, the director and his dog both struggle with OCD. Through the film, we discover the different aspects of this overwhelming anxiety. The events occur in the family home, where we are acquainted with several characters: the director's father, mother, two sisters, and their children.
In his quest for healing, the filmmaker attempts to dissect his environment by seeking the roots of pain in childhood, fears, and hidden struggles.
Bassem's film seems to be more of a psychotherapeutic journey. In his quest to understand his anxiety and after seeking various treatments, the director discovers the different roots of his pain. First, the genetic factor comes to light, as the mother and the two sisters also suffer from anxiety. We also discover the aspect of the war: its traumatic events fueled the director's anxiety and affected his childhood.
Between memory and intimacy, family portrait films deliver a strong emotional charge that affects the project's aesthetics most often. Ultimately, it is the ”sentimental” image that filmmakers care to create and convey.
Embarking on a quest to have a better understanding of the ”self” and of that ”self” in relationship to others is a necessary step towards one's repositioning and self-fulfillment in this country's endless struggle. It is this ”self” and that ”self” in relationship to others that filmmakers try to find within the intimate place that one might call ”home”.