Towards the Sun

Nour Ouayda | 2019 | 17 minutes
Arabic with English or French Subtitles
Color | Stereo | MiniDV to HD

Synopsis

You are now in the main hall of the National Museum in Beirut. A guard reminds you that you are encouraged to touch the archeological objects. A voice in your headset suggests that you lick the stone. You are now facing a hole in the wall on the lower left corner of a mosaic. The voice in your headset indicates that it was made by a sniper. Out of curiosity, you dial 1-9-9-1 to listen to the rest of the story.

The story is literally on the surface, reflected in the tactile materiality of the figures. Sculptures that are otherwise precisely characterized by weight, depth and substance. And at the same time, the myopic focus of the camera’s gaze on the surface is also a way into the history of the sculptures and their lived lives at the National Museum in Beirut. – Pernille Lystlund Matzen, The Endless Depths of the Surface, translated from Danish

Credits 

A film by Nour Ouayda | Narrators: Danya Hammoud & Ghalas Charara | Sound Recording: Tatiana El Dahdah | Sound Design and Mixing: Shakeeb Abu Hamdan | Arabic Text Translation: Ziad Chakaroun | Distribution: Collectif Jeune Cinéma

Screenings

New:Vision competition, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, March 2019
Lebanese short film program, Écrans du Réel, Beirut, May 2019
META-LOGIE program, Leiden international short film experience, Leiden, Netherlands, May 2019
International Competition Award, Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris, France, October 2019
VOD, Tënk, October 2019
Experimental film competition, Sharjah Film Platform, Sharjah, December 2019
You are now facing a crack in a stone, curated by Stefano Miraglia, L’Hybride, Lille, March 2020
Putting Our Finger in It – competition programme, European Media Art Festival (EMAF), online edition, April 2020
Shorts Program, Toronto Arab Film Festival, online edition, July 2020
a boat is never silent, programme at Images Festival, online edition, May 2021
Le parole della note, curated by Stefano Miraglia, Nomadica, Bologna, October 2021
All that Remains: Archeology and the Image, curated by Alex Faoro, Woodbine, Queens, December 2021
The Dead Shall be Raised, Prospectif Cinéma 2022, Centre Pompidou, January 2022
Temporal Weavings: History, Craft and Perception, Âge d’Or Exprmntl, Cinematek, Brussels, October 2023
Stranger than Fiction, VISIONS, in collaboration with Hors Champ, La lumière, Montréal, December 2023
Return us to one another, Xanadu, Berlin, February 2024