The Green Line

Nour Ouayda | Spring 2021 | Instagram specific capsule

Synopsis

A stroll with Camelia in the neighborhood around her apartment in Beirut. More than ever, the film becomes tactile: it is up to us, thanks to our fingers, our thumb, to edit it, to create or not silences, to move forward or backward in this proposal that Nour Ouayda makes us. The Instagram platform then becomes an editing table both horizontal (the elements are jostled from left to right, creating conflict with the Arabic script used) and vertical (the capsules cohabiting with others from different accounts).  – Collectif Jeune Cinema

In May 2021, Collectif Jeune Cinema invited 14 artists to participate in Broadcasting Experiments for Smartphones. This online-specific program featured contributions that were meant to be viewed on smartphones, utilizing online transfer and video-sharing platforms as well as social media outlets.

The Green Line is a two-part Instagram post that uses the carousel feature of the social media app to present diverse materials that include short videos, photographs, and screen recordings to create a constellation of audio-visual material that tells the story of Camelia as she takes a stroll in her neighborhood, along what was once the green line in Beirut. The user is free to jump from one element to another, re-editing the story as they wish. The two capsules were posted at 11 am and 7 pm on Collectif Jeune Cinema’s Instagram account on the 7th of May 2021 and remained online for 24 hours.

Credits 

An Instagram capsule by Nour Ouayda | Produced by The Camelia Committee | With the voice of Ghalas Charara | Arabic Text Editing by Ziad Chakaroun

What magical garden was hidden in Beirut? And was the green line the only path towards it?

But she soon grew older and discovered that the line was not actually drawn on the ground, that the soil of Beirut was full of corpses, and that the line had divided her city into two parallel parts that never intersect.