From a City with No Images
Fall Grant 2011 - Production/Post-Production Stage
Sabine El Chamaa / Short Experimental or Essay / Lebanon, Qatar / 40 min / Colour and B&W / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: Docufiction
Synopsis
Many images… First: A woman looks at a book of pictures. She cries. ‘Have you seen what they did to my city?’ Pictures make her cry. Can she slap the picture to hurt it the way it hurt her? Second: A wide-angle image of Beirut being bombed in 1982. An image betrays an angle of experience that the narrator never had. In the image, the narrator stands next to a soldier in the city but, in memory, she is someone inside the buildings being bombed. The two images meet. They fight. Third: A grandmother sits with her neighbour watching the live bombing of Beirut in 2006. How can they watch such images? Why don’t they stand and yell in horror? And more images remain.
Credits
- Director
- Sabine El Chamaa
- Screenwriter
- Sabine El Chamaa
- Producer
- Sabine El Chamaa
About the Director
Sabine El Chamaa is a Lebanese filmmaker. She studied film at the University of Southern California and worked as a freelance editor in the USA and Europe before focusing on writing and directing her own films. El Chamaa currently lives in London, where she is pursuing a doctorate in Media at Goldsmiths University of London.