MOHAMED SOUEID - A CIVIL WAR

Lebanese video pioneer, filmmaker, writer and critic Mohamed Soueid (1959) blends narrative with prose, essay with poem, and conversation with speculation. His documentaries are embodiments of his personal life and try to address lost causes. Civil War, the final part of a trilogy of the same name, investigates the mysterious death of Soueid’s cinematographer friend Mohamed Douybaess. In the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, the film gently skirts the man’s memory through a series of interviews with friends and family members. These fragments clearly address important issues that still prevail in the lives of the Lebanese post-war generation. Through dentists, for example, we learn that the Lebanese have the highest rate of tooth decay in the world -a symptom of collective trauma. Recurring images and sounds of war, destruction, and growling and howling animals are juxtaposed with a different more promising Lebanese reality, however these sounds over the shots of Beirut pedestrians, seem to suggest the bestial nature under the city’s civilized veneer. Through various discourses, whether it is the interviewees talking to the camera or the desolate woman’s monologue during the cafe encounter, Civil War maps the Lebanese society’s repression and post trauma stress and uneasiness which seems to suggest that psychologically, Lebanon is still at war within the minds of its people.

Screening in the presence of Mohamed Soueid.

In collaboration with Les Halles and the festival Beyrouth plus belle qu’elle ne l’était.
www.halles.be
French subtitles: Les Halles with the support of Rudy Demotte, Ministre-Président du Gouvernement de la Communauté français. Cinéma Arenberg is showing the other parts of the trilogy in the end of March.
For information visit www.arenberg.be

A Civil War. Mohamed Soueid
2002, video, 84’, colour, Arab spoken, French subtitles