Beirut Stills

Art & Science Multidisciplinary Team, France/Lebanon

  • Assaf Dahdah +

    Marseille, France

    Assaf Dahdah is a geographer, CNRS researcher in laboratoire UMR 5281 ART-Dev and associated to laboratoire UMR 7317 TELEMME. Defended in 2015 at Aix-Marseille Université, his PhD focused on migration issues and urban inequalities in Beirut. Based on a comparison approach he analyzes the exile experiences in Marseille, Beirut and Mersin (Turkey). Click here to learn more.

  • Chaghig Arzoumanian +

    Paris, France
    Beirut, Lebanon

    Chaghig Arzoumanian is a filmmaker and film editor who works between Paris and Beirut. Her first feature film, Geographies, premiered at the Cinéma du Réel. She has also edited several films, such as Crossing the Seventh Gate directed by Ali Essafi, which was screened at the Berlinale Forum in 2017. She pursued a Ph.D. in Film Aesthetics at the University of Paris 8. 

  • Anaïs Farine +

    Paris, France

    Anaïs Farine is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies (University Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle). She has published articles in a number of journals (Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Anik: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, Africultures) and in the publication  Jeux sérieux. Cinéma et arts contemporains transforment l'essai.

Chaghig Arzoumanian, Beirut (photomontage), 2019

The Beirut Stills project, which has been collecting films since the 1970s, aimed to produce a film made up of extracts from Lebanese cinematography. The montage of urban motifs that come back systematically - such as panoramas, the entrance to Beirut, check-points, the vacuum centre, Luna Park or even nightlife - is based on a collective viewing experience and aims to preserve the soundtrack that conjured up these images. By conducting interviews with ice directors, the Beirut Stills project seeked to articulate questions related to the representation of the city in cinema to those of the city lived and/or claimed by the filmmakers.

The team was in residence at Camargo from January 23 to February 19 and from November 12 to 26, 2019 in partnership with LabexMed. 

Les Carnets de Camargo

"Les Carnets de Camargo" is a collaborative project born during the lockdown in 2020. Originally, it encouraged the Fellows and residents at Camargo to share their experiences and insights on this period. "Les Carnets de Camargo" also aim at being a bond for our community, through reflection and exchange. For this reason, we have involved past residents over the world in sharing visual, written, and spoken contributions to reflect on these changing times.

Anaïs Farine participated in this project through her text "The City Center is erased, But The Sea Shines", a carnet written in Beirut between May and August 2020, which revisits the experience of working collectively on the Beirut Stills project, initiated during a residency at the Camargo Foundation in 2019. Based on films, encounters and more or less recent memories of the author, it questions the experience of seeing together and its possibilities.

Read her text in English.