Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation

Film program curated by Nour Ouayda
In collaboration with Dawawine and the Arab Image Foundation | 13-15 March 2025 | Beirut

Հայերէն | عربية

Tales of Two Who Dreamt by Andrea Bussmann and Nicolás Pereda
2016 | Canada, Mexico | 82’ | in Hungarian with English Subtitles | Thursday March 13th at 7.30pm

 Drifting between fiction and documentary, Tales of Two Who Dreamt follows a family of Hungarian Roma asylum seeking refugees living in a large apartment complex in Toronto. The film follows their everyday life routines and ventures into the characters’ hopes and dreams. The film follows various members of the family and conveys the effects of displacement and disconnection in their hope to build a sense of community in a foreign space.

Followed by a discussion between Nour Ouayda (Program Curator) & Rami el Sabbagh (Dawawine)

Purple, Bodies in Translation by Joe Namy
2017 | Lebanon | 20’ | in English with Arabic Subtitles | Friday March 14th at 7.30pm

In Purple, Bodies in Translation the image is defined by what is heard––subtitled voices woven together with threads sampled from stories, poems, songs––all addressing the poetics of purple as a feeling. The film is centered around two texts by Lina Mounzer and Stefan Tarnowski that reflect on the intricacies of subtitling testimonials and videos from survivors of the war in Syria and the act of translation as an internalized process.

جٌرِن أٌوكّرِيد [Land Listening, Beirut version] by Philip Rizk
2025 | Egyptian Nubia | 11’ | in Nubian language Fadijja/Mahasi with Arabic translation | Friday March 14th at 7.30pm

The short film Land Listening features River People, who belong to a cosmology that entails relationships among all kinds of beings. Ever since the construction of dams, culminating with the Aswan High Dam in 1964 and the resulting dispossession of many Nubian communities from their ancestral lands and the severing of their close bond with the Nile, these stories have begun to erode. Will we let them expire?

Las Mujeres de Pinochet [Pinochet’s Women] by Eduardo Menz
2004 | Canada | 12’ | in Spanish with English Subtitles | Friday March 14th at 7.30pm

A personal yet political video, Mujeres tries to show more than it shows. Feelings of theft and atrocity, truth and beauty, nationalism and memory are invoked for the viewers to experience as they are invited to role play through the repeated employment and alteration of the text, sound and image until his or her expectations have been truthfully realized. The video examines class structure, the meaning of beauty and forgotten history through two very different but significant women during Pinochet’s brutal regime of the late 1980s.

Drei Atlas [Three Atlas] by Miryam Charles
2018 | Haïti, Canada | 7’ | in German & Creole with English Subtitles | Friday March 14th at 7.30pm

A maid is suspected of murdering her former employer. Questioned by the police, she will reveal the existence of a supernatural power.

Followed by a discussion between Philip Rizk (filmmaker) and Vartan Avakian (artist) [online].

Complicities and Conspiracies : a conversation on language, translation, accessibility and circulation | Saturday March 15th at 5pm

The translation of texts, sounds, and images creates entry points to engage with literary, photographic, and cinematic gestures across different languages and territories. Translation enables circulation: it can provide access when and where access is needed. It also has the power to condition that access, to shape it or even deny it. This conversation will bring together researchers, translators, filmmakers, artists and film programmers to discuss their collaboration on this program and their reflections on gestures of translation in their work.

With Malak Mroueh (AIF), Sara Sehanoui & Rami el Sabbagh (Dawawine), Anaïs Farine (Researcher & Film Programmer), Vartan Avakian & Hussein Nassereddine (Artists), Araz Kojayan (Researcher), moderated by Nour Ouayda (Program Curator) 

Սայաթ Նովա [Sayat Nova / The Color of Pomegranates] by Sergei Parajanov
1969 | Soviet Union | 76’ | in Armenian with Arabic Subtitles | Saturday March 15th at 7.30pm

A portrait of the 18th-century Armenian poet and musician Sayat Nova, the ‘King of Song’. Through his poetry and a series of lavish tableaux, the film charts his life from humble weaver, to king’s minstrel and monk before being martyred during the Persian invasion of his monastery.

 The film will be screened with an Arabic translation made by Vartan Avakian and Hussein Nassereddine in the framework of this program.

Sayat Nova was restored by Cineteca di Bologna / L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, in association with the Cinema Foundation of Armenia and Gosfilmofond of Russia. Restoration funded by the Material World Foundation.

Followed by a discussion with Vartan Avakian (artist) & Hussein Nassereddine (visual artist)

Francesco Anselmetti is a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He has worked as a translator for the Sharjah Art Foundation, New Left Review and the Institute for Palestine Studies. 

Vartan Avakian is an artist working with video, photography, and sculpture. He is a board member of the Arab Image Foundation.

Andrea Bussmann, born in Toronto, Canada, holds an M.A. in social anthropology and an M.F.A. in film production. She directed He Whose Face Gives No Light (2011) and co-directed Tales of Two Who Dreamt (2016), which won Best Documentary at Festival International de Films de Femmes. Her film Fausto (2018) premiered at Locarno, TIFF, and New Directors/New Films, winning Best Latin Feature at Mar del Plata. She received the Discovery Award from the Directors Guild of Canada in 2018.

Ziad Chakaroun was born in Beirut in 1982. He lives and works in Madrid and Beirut. He obtained a BA in theater for the Institute of Fine Arts – Lebanese University, and a master in Spanish-Arabic translation from “Escuela de Traductores de Toledo”, Spain. He collaborated as an actor/performer in cinema and theater works by artists from both Lebanon and Spain, during which he developed a special interest for the use of the word/language and the value of the body and images in the contemporary times.

Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer of Haitian descent, who lives in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. She is also the director of several short films. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec, and internationally. She has just completed the direction of her first feature film, This House. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.

Anaïs Farine is Research Consultant at the Cinematheque Beirut and a lecturer at USJ and at ALBA. Her Ph.D thesis focused on the so-called “Euro-Mediterranean dialogue” and its Filmic Imaginary. Since 2016, Anaïs has been investigating the collective practices in the making and discussion of films of the Arab Alternative Movement with a focus on the history of the Arab Ciné Club in Beirut. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Festival Ciné-Palestine.

Araz Kojayan is a researcher, essayist, and translator. Her interest in performance art and spatial diffusion has led her to pursue an MA in Anthropology focusing on movements of bodies through space. She also holds a BA in Armenian Studies, with research focus on the development of the Armenian Diaspora’s relationship with its motherland. Currently, she is a member of Parrhesia Collective—an international group of women comprising artists, academics, and activists working across various fields such as photography, dance, film, sociology, literature, and history—and Loutsqi Collective—engaged in creating a sci-fi graphic novel in Western Armenian.

Malak Mroueh (b. Nabatieh, South Lebanon) is a filmmaker and cultural worker whose practice explores the entanglements of queer bodies, archives, and violence. Through a series of short films, she traces the spectral remains of disappearance, negotiating memory as both wound and weapon.

Eduardo Menz is a filmmaker based in Montreal, Canada. He is a member of the Double Negative Collective who showcase international experimental filmmakers’ works and exhibit their own films and videos at numerous festivals internationally. Eduardo’s film work has always attempted to transgress and interweave the boundaries of what defines fiction, documentary and experimental film genres. His films and videos have been shown at several distinguished festivals worldwide and have won awards at Brooklyn Film Festival, Big Muddy in Illinois, NextFrame Touring Film Festival in the U.S., Les Rendez-Vous du Cinema Quebecois in Montreal, Hot Docs and Images Festival in Toronto.

Joe Namy is an artist, composer, and educator whose practice encompasses sound, its history and impact on the built environment. Working collaboratively through public sculptures and performances, Namy’s work considers the social construction of sound and the political forces that enable its transmission. The artist’s work also critically engages with the gender dynamics of sound, migration patterns of instruments, and translation between languages, between score and sound, and between instruments and bodies in movement and dance.

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Beirut and Paris. His work originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, and image-making. His works, performances and texts have been presented in museums, biennales and institutions around the world.

Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction making in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was the partnerships coordinator then deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project. She also teaches film programming in Beirut.

Sergei Parajanov is a filmmaker and screenwriter. He was born in Tiflis, Georgia (then part of the Soviet Union) to Armenian parents. He first studied singing and choreography in his city of birth and later attended the VGIK film school in Moscow, going on to work in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan during the Soviet era. His films are imbued with the cultures, traditions and myths of these countries and captivate due to their singular power of expression, unmistakable originality, complex visual compositions and radically free cinematic form. Parajanov’s artistic daring and the cultural diversity expressed by his films was met with hostility in the Soviet Union. Interventions on the part of the censors were followed by fake trials, prison sentences and working bans. He is regarded internationally as an exceptional filmmaker and is one of the most fascinating figures in 20th century cinema.

Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His films have been exhibited in festivals around the world like Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto and San Sebastian. He has had more than thirty retrospectives in various festivals, cinematheques and archives.

Philip Rizk is a film maker and writer from Cairo, currently living in Berlin. In his films Out on the Street (2015), Mapping Lessons (2020) and Terrible Sounds (2022) he uses performance and the technique of montage to experiment with methods of “making the habitual strange”. In a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is “how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?”. You can follow his work @ filfilfilm.com.