The Land Was Well Past its Zenith
Fall Grants 2023 - Production Stage
Rita Mahfouz / Short Experimental or Essay / Lebanon, Qatar / 15 min / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: Experimental
Synopsis
The film is a short experimental essay that wanders the streets of Beirut in 2024, five years after the beginning of the (ongoing and worsening) economic crisis and four years after the port explosion, the repercussions of which are still visible today. Crafting non-familiar recording techniques, the film proposes new ways to capture space on film. It recreates traditional non-perspectival painting while employing imagery of modern warfare instruments. Combining multi-perspectival elements into one image, it reflects on a city that has been abundantly filmed, surveilled, and mediatised.
The film documents everyday life and urban textures of Beirut in the aftermath of the 2019-20 crises. However, it’s less interested in representing the city as a post-traumatic space than in delineating the hidden political structures that made such disasters possible. In fact, what perpetuated and remained hidden since the end of the civil war, the status quo of the apparent functioning of a political and economic model that lasted for thirty years, has been ‘exposed’ in 2019-2020. The film seeks to reconcile the city with its photographic representation by similarly ‘exposing’ the hidden structures of the camera as an apparatus—as changing topographies require the foundational adjustment of modes of representation.
Credits
- Director
- Rita Mahfouz
- Screenwriter
- Rita Mahfouz
- Producer
- Josef Khallouf
About the Director
Rita Mahfouz is a visual artist with a background in film. She received a BA and ‘Maîtrise’ in Cinema and Television from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Lebanon (2006); an MA in Visual-Arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (2018); and is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in Arts at the University of Edinburgh. Mahfouz has worked in the audio-visual industry as a video editor since 2006, and in 2018, she began creating her own lens-based work. Her short films and photographs have been showcased in numerous local and international film festivals (such as Sharjah Film Platform, Arquiteturas Film Festival, RPM Fest) and art exhibitions (including Beirut Art Center; Sursock Museum, and CICA Museum, South Korea).