Prophecies from the Sea

Film program curated by Nour Ouayda & Rami El Sabbagh
for the 67th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen | May 2021 | Online

Towards the end of Ghassan Salhab’s The Valley, the characters, living in a house far from the capital located in the Bekaa valley, hear the news on the radio that Beirut has been wiped out by air raids. During the film’s premiere in Beirut in 2015, the majority of the audience in attendance were living and working in Beirut, some from a generation that had lived there during the civil wars. The moment that voice on the radio informed both the characters in the fiction and the audience in the cinema of the news that their city had been destroyed, a collective feeling of fear overwhelmed the theatre and a mute silence took over. With this announcement, we suddenly were not an audience in front of a film anymore but the inhabitants of a city that was annihilated. In 2015, this radio announcement triggered a collective fear that spoke to residues of past traumatic events and the distress of such an attack happening again. While we thought the film was solely telling us of this fear, we did not know that it was in fact announcing that such an event will happen a few years later.

Prophecies from the sea focuses on film and video works made in moments of transition, in spaces of transformation that follow catastrophes. Made ‘after’ these incidents, the assumption is that these works only speak of past experiences, but we know that they also conjure future events.

The program proposes that films occupying such liminal spaces become forcibly prophetic since in these instances of catastrophe, time collapses on itself: 2006 echoes 1982 but also 2020 and another date to come. In a landscape where disasters continue to occur, the experience of a film is what renders these premonitions accessible today. The films in this program attempt to carry the catastrophe, whether it appears in the work or not. They are sickened by it, their form is affected and modified by its infinite reverberation through time and place. They not only reveal prophecies, but bear witness to their becoming.

The program was coposed of two curated screening sessions, a comissioned sound piece by Urok Shirhan and a recorded conversation between the curators, researcher Ghada Sayegh and filmmaker Danielle Davie.

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A Thousand Faces | Urok Shirhan | 10′

The Audio-Piece is a commission for the sound artist and researcher Urok Shirhan to re-edit the soundtrack of the 1971 film A Hundred Faces for a Single Day by Christian Ghazi.

Listen to the piece here.

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Film Program #1 | 62 minutes

Quantum superposition and states | Chantal Partamian | 2020 | 6’’ 
As part of a series of experiments on celluloid, this capsule was made to mark the exact time of the catastrophe and its echo throughout continents and time differences.

The Disquiet | Ali Cherri | 2013 | 19’
Earth-shattering events are relatively par for the course in Lebanon, with war, political upheaval and a number of social revolts. While the Lebanese focus on surface level events that could rock the nation, few realize that below the ground we walk on, an actual shattering of the earth is mounting. Lebanon stands on several major fault lines, which are cracks in the earth’s crust. The film investigates the geological situation in Lebanon, trying to look for the traces of the imminent disaster.

Emergence (Micro-Commissions #3: Insecure) | Malak Mroueh | 2020 | 3’30”
4 filmmakers and videographers were invited by the Beirut Art Center (BAC) to make a short narrative film using only recordings from the 6 security cameras set up in the BAC’s space. During the preparations for these commissions, a heavier reference imposed itself onto the visual imaginaries tied to CCTV footage, and that is the anticipation of the disaster that rushed into the intimacy of our lives and demolished our shelters.

I only wish that I could weep | The Atlas Group | 2002 | 7’
This document is attributed to Operator #17, a Lebanese Army intelligence officer who was assigned to monitor the Corniche, a seaside boardwalk in Beirut. From 1997 on, the officer decided to videotape the sunset instead of his assigned target. This videotape recounts the operator’s story and concentrates on the footage he was permitted to keep after his dismissal.

Merely a Smell | Maher Abi Samra | 2007 | 10’
Summer 2006, the Israeli war against Lebanon. A boat makes its way towards besieged Beirut to evacuate foreign nationals. Under the rubble, destroyed buildings. The survivors drag out the corpses of the dead. Moving between light and darkness, between life and its extinction, the bodies of the living sketch out the silhouettes of other bodies, the odour of death covering everything.

Parasomnia (Micro-Commissions #3: Insecure) | Lara Tabet | 2020 | 4’38”
4 filmmakers and videographers were invited by the Beirut Art Center (BAC) to make a short narrative film using only recordings from the 6 security cameras set up in the BAC’s space. During the preparations for these commissions, a heavier reference imposed itself onto the visual imaginaries tied to CCTV footage, and that is the anticipation of the disaster that rushed into the intimacy of our lives and demolished our shelters.

Dog River (Nahr el Kaleb) | Liana Kassir & Renaud Pachot | 2017 | 15’
Two tired combatants wait for night to fall, by the Dog River.

Children of War | Jocelyne Saab | 1976 | 10’
Days after the Karantina massacre in a predominantly Muslim shanty town in Beirut, Jocelyne Saab met children who had escaped, and who were deeply traumatised by the horrific fighting they’d seen with their own eyes. She gave them crayons and encouraged them to draw while her camera filmed. She made a bitter discovery: the only games the children engaged in were war games, and the war would quickly become a way of life for them as well.

Film Program #2 | 66 minutes

Quantum superposition and states | Chantal Partamian | 2020 | 6’’ 
As part of a series of experiments on celluloid, this capsule was made to mark the exact time of the catastrophe and its echo throughout continents and time differences.

Prologue | Hassan Julien Chehouri | 2019 | 30’’
“I made this short video in 2019, shot on my phone from my balcony which overlooks the port. Overlooking the 2700 tons of ammonium nitrate.”

The Video Story | Vartan Avakian | 2015 | 17’ 24’’
He bought a video camera in 1983, and nothing has been the same since. “Films are reality”, he told me. Some years later he asked for Nicole Ballan’s leaked sextape.

Beirut died and we are yet to be born | Alaa Mansour | 2021 | 2’34’’
Sealed within a liquid tragedy, how does time pass between an uprising and a catastrophe?

Unstuck or Billy Pilgrim Has Become Unstuck in Time (Micro-Commissions #3: Insecure)
Panos Aprahamian | 2020 | 4’26”
4 filmmakers and videographers were invited by the Beirut Art Center (BAC) to make a short narrative film using only recordings from the 6 security cameras set up in the BAC’s space. During the preparations for these commissions, a heavier reference imposed itself onto the visual imaginaries tied to CCTV footage, and that is the anticipation of the disaster that rushed into the intimacy of our lives and demolished our shelters.

Threshold | Rania Stephane | 2018 | 12’
Characters come in and out of doors. They enter rooms only to leave them seconds after. Our hero stands on the threshold of a gate waiting to gain access to the home of a doctor suspected in a case of mysterious disappearances. Keeping only scenes where doors, portals and gates appear, Rania Stephan re-edits the footage of the 1987 Egyptian sci-fi film “The Master of Time” by Kamal Al-Sheikh to condense it into a ballet of trajectories, revealing the multiplicity of the threshold motif.

Singeuse (Micro-Commissions #3: Insecure) | Danielle Davie | 2020 | 4’59”
4 filmmakers and videographers were invited by the Beirut Art Center (BAC) to make a short narrative film using only recordings from the 6 security cameras set up in the BAC’s space. During the preparations for these commissions, a heavier reference imposed itself onto the visual imaginaries tied to CCTV footage, and that is the anticipation of the disaster that rushed into the intimacy of our lives and demolished our shelters.

(posthume) | Ghassan Salhab | 2007 | 29’
Shot some time after the Israeli attack that took place in the summer of 2006, (posthume) is an essay haunted at once by the present absence of any fiction, and the omnipresence of the real.