Mohamed Soueid, The Sky Is Not Always Above, 2006, Lebanon/UAE, film still
The Sky Is Not Always Above (2006), Mohamed Soueid, Lebanon/UAE, 93 min. Arabic [English subtitles]
Being Camelia (selection, 1994), Mohamed Soueid, Lebanon, 5 min. Arabic [English subtitles]
June 29: With an introduction by Rasha Salti
Being Camelia is a series of experimental short clips that Mohamed Soueid directed while part of the team of TéléLiban, Lebanon’s main public television channel. Initially intended as a special filler program on food and scheduled to be aired during Ramadan in 1994, these 34 films, each five minutes, were turned into a controversial satirical daily series criticizing Lebanese food culture and depicting the ongoing changes impacting postwar Lebanon.
In The Sky Is Not Always Above, Beirut’s southern suburbs, notorious as a staunch Hezbollah stronghold, are at once a high-security zone, a site of exception vis-a-vis the writ of Lebanese government, and a recurring target for the Israeli army’s warplanes. Shot after the devastating Israeli war in July 2006, Soueid unearths the winding paths of the district’s rich and forgotten history. And during the captivating journey, he crafts an understated homage to John Ford.
Rasha Salti is a curator and writer with a focus on film practice in the Arab World. She lives and works between Beirut and Paris.
TV Politics is a film program that revisits some of the most significant attempts to articulate a radical approach to the politics of television since the mid twentieth century. It revisits film works conceived for the purpose of rethinking what television could be, while at the same time seeking to provide a different kind of analysis of social and cultural reality.
