“A historic city, without a history.” (from Beyrouth, ma ville by Jocelyn Saab)
Marked by violence, war, and destruction, Beirut has endured decades of conflict, leaving behind a fractured history. Together, the films in this thread seek to preserve personal memories and histories while reflecting on the wider collective consciousness and reconstructed history of the city and the country. Through lived experience, personal recollection, and archival materials, these films piece together fragments of Beirut’s past, constructing new forms of both individual and collective memory.
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Thread Beirut, Lebanon
Do You Love Me?
Through archival footage, the fragmented history of the last seventy years of Beirut— a nation without a national archive — is brought to life, serving both as a love letter to the city and a disorienting portrait of its collective memory.
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How does one’s personal archive — including ammunition casings, WhatsApp exchanges, and a cassette tape — connect their owner and us viewers, to a distant Lebanon marked by war?
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Thread Beirut, Lebanon
Far from Beyrouth
From their Brussels apartment, Mon tries to support his partner Karim in besieged Beirut, watching from afar through WhatsApp messages, cell phone footage, and news broadcasting.
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When Israel besieges Beirut in 1982, Jocelyne Saab watches her family home go up in flames, taking 150 years of family history with it. Amid the ruins of the city, she searches for the origins and consequences of the tragedy. Every place becomes a history, every name a memory.
From Asia to Africa to America, the films in this thread explore the politics embedded in land and urban space, uncovering histories of dispossession, exile, extraction, marginalisation, and conflict. These essay films demonstrate and theorise that cities and landscapes are never merely backgrounds against which larger histories unfold; they are spaces shaped, marked, and embodied by social systems. Through the camera lens, these systems become tangible, inscribed in the world of both past and present.
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Two channels trace a North Korean defector’s forty-day escape from imprisonment in Northeast China, showing us dense landscapes layered with historical and contemporary significance.
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In the Congo Basin, two scientists and an unlikely third voice reveal colonialism's enduring legacy through the intertwined exploitation of individuals and the environment.
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A landmark essay film in which director Masao Adachi reconstructs the life of a teenage murderer through the spaces he once traversed, rejecting sensationalism and using landscapes as his primary subject, offering meditations on violence and the political forces embedded in everyday life.
