7:00 PM
ANXIOUS IN BEIRUT
by Zakaria Jaber
In Arabic with English subtitles, 2023, 93 min, DCP

Film Notes

“LIFE ITSELF IS A FILM, WITH THUNDERSTORMS AS ITS SOUNDTRACK”: ANXIOUS IN BEIRUT

Lebanese director Zakaria Jaber’s debut ANXIOUS IN BEIRUT (2023) is a cinematic tour de force that undermines the clichés about what documentary is. Every frame, every sound, debunks the fictional boundary between what counts as the personal and the political, the filmmaker and the event. Documenting three years of the revolutionary events between 2019 and 2022 with a cinéma vérité methodology, Jaber moves across time by intercutting a constellation of media: miniDV footage of his childhood, newspaper clippings, family photographs – all of which function as personal records enabling a critique of the neoliberalization that followed the end of the civil war and the broken promises made to the civil peace generation. The argument is dialectical: Jaber narrativizes his life as necessarily entangled with key moments in Lebanese socio-political history, whereas politics is also shaped by the organization of people who push back against the capitalist regime initiated by businessman Rafic Hariri’s rule. Politics does not belong to those in power, to the bank lords, to the financiers and the ruling families; politics belongs to movements mobilized by the people and their resistance. A refrain recurs in the voice-over throughout the film: “In this country, you have two options: the grave or the airplane.” And yet, between the duality of the coffin and the plane – between premature death at the hands of state violence and the imposed recourse of migration – Jaber finds a third way: to film, relentlessly, the present, to critically confront the ghost of the past, and to awaken a collective political consciousness that counteracts the soporific effects of ruling-class ideologies.

Introduced by researcher Andrea Avidad, and followed by a Q&A with co-producers Adrià Lahuerta & Carlota Coloma.

This screening is supported by the Institut Ramon Llull, NYU’s Espacio de Culturas, and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies.

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