Mohamed Soueid, Nightfall, 2000, Lebanon, film still
Nightfall (2000), Mohamed Soueid, Lebanon, 80 min. Arabic with English subtitles
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) student brigade included leftist students from Lebanon who mobilized around the struggle for the liberation of Palestine in the early 1970s. With the departure of the PLO’s armed forces from Lebanon after the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, the brigade was disbanded. Soueid was part of the group, and as the Lebanese civil war ended, he decided to film them and revisit their shared sites of memory, drawing a raspy-voiced portrait of defeated militants infused with poetry and generously doused in alcohol.
Being Camelia (selection, 1994), Mohamed Soueid, Lebanon, 5 min. Arabic with English subtitles
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.
August 11: With presentation by Mohamed Soueid and Rasha Salti
Mohamed Soueid is a Lebanese writer, dramaturge, filmmaker and producer.
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.
