Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York
Thursday, April 18, 2024
7 pm

The seventh installment of our ongoing film series at Anthology Film Archives where we will be screening two documentary-adjacent films about the Lebanese civil war, its aftermath, and its mediation. Borhane Alaouié’s Letter From a Time of Exile, though scripted, is shot like a documentary and often confused for one, while Akram Zaatari’s All is Well on the Border deftly deconstructs the genre of post-war resistance hagiography.

Borhane Alaouié
Letter From a Time of Exile
1988, 52 min, 16mm-to-digital
Arabic and French with English subtitles
Shot in a pseudo-documentary style, Letter From a Time of Exile presents the stories of four Lebanese men whose lives have taken unexpected turns due to the Civil War: Abdallah, a former militia member; Karim, an unemployed journalist living in Paris; Rizkallah, a car salesman in Brussels; and Nessim, a surgeon who has settled in Strasbourg. Narrated with subtle humor, Letter From a Time of Exile is both a portrait of people in exile, and the cities in which they currently reside.

Akram Zaatari
All is Well on the Border
1997, 44 min, video
In Arabic with English subtitles
Focusing on the Israeli occupation of the South, All is Well is an early example of Zaatari’s explorations into postwar Lebanese memory culture through the collection of testimonies and documents. Working at Rafic Hariri’s Future TV at the time, Zaatari was particularly interested in the ways in which histories of resistance were mediated and exploited in their dissemination; Zaatari centers his own mediation by having genuine testimonies and letters from imprisoned fighters read by actors, revealing their teleprompters and script pages on screen. All is Well is an incisive meditation on the propagation of resistance stories.