Mohamed Soueid, How Bitter My Sweet, 2009, Lebanon/UAE, film still
How Bitter My Sweet (2009), Mohamed Soueid, Lebanon/UAE, 2009, 90 min. Arabic with English subtitles
Being Camelia (selection, 1994), Mohamed Soueid, Lebanon, 5 min. Arabic with English subtitles
June 30: With an introduction by Rasha Salti
Being Camelia is a series of experimental short clips that Mohamed Soueid directed while being part of the team of TéléLiban, Lebanon’s main public television channel. Intended initially as a special filler program on food, and scheduled to be aired during Ramadan, in 1994, these 34 x 5 min. were turned into a controversial satirical daily series criticizing Lebanese food culture and depicting the ongoing changes occurring in postwar Lebanon.
In How Bitter Is My Sweet, six characters, two cities, many homelands, the bitter and the sweet of overcoming life’s hardships, are told by everyday people who dwell at the fringes of society and the informal economy. Fragmented and tender, this film is Soueid’s free-style poetic ode to the colloquial chroniclers of war, strife, exile, and place-making.
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.
