MOHAMAD SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE
Screening Online: March 3-13
RSVP at artearchive.org
Free/ Suggested donation $5
Video pioneer, cinema auteur, and television producer Mohamed Soueid has collected stories from his compatriots for most of his adult life. Widely regarded as Beirut’s first video artist, Soueid films defy categorization. Soueid has also worked as a film critic and wrote two books on cinema, Postponed Cinema –Lebanese Films During the Civil War (1986) and O Heart – A Film Autobiography on the Late Movie Theatres Of Old Beirut (1996).
Though often personal, the cinema of Mohamed Soueid is never onanistic. On the contrary, his passions, obsessions, and observations are orchestrated through a panoply of voices, characters, and (unrelated) circumstances. Contrary to dominant trends, inclusivity in the cinema of Soueid is not a performance but a reality, which is why it is pointless to even categorize his films as either fiction or documentary. His cinema simply is. It is the organic and therefore incoherent incarnation of his unfiltered curiosity, of his convivial friendships and his boundless love for cinema.
Soueid’s direction is neither omniscient nor omnipotent; he does not pretend or even try to resolve the contradictions his films contain. He is not afraid to expose his own fragility, as a man and a filmmaker, something so very rare in the cinema of all ages and places.
– Giovanni Vimercati
The film program will be accompanied by a pre-recorded discussion with the filmmaker.
Film Program:
CINEMA FOUAD (1994, 41 min)
TANGO OF YEARNING (1998, 70 min)
NIGHTFALL (2000, 68 min)
MY HEART BEATS ONLY FOR HER (2008, 87 min)
THE INSOMNIA OF A SERIAL DREAMER (2020, 170 min)
The MOHAMED SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE is co-presented by ArteEast and Anthology Film Archives and curated by Giovanni Vimercati. This series is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. In addition to in-person, theatrical screenings at Anthology (March 3-8), the series will be presented on artearchive.org from March 3-13. For more information, visit artearchive.org
