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MOHAMAD SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE

This August, the Unpacking the ArteArchive program: MOHAMAD SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE will screen as part of the AANM Arab Film Festival!  

Screening online: August 12-21

Available Worldwide

RSVP HERE

 

Film Program

Cinema Fouad, Lebanon, 1994, 41 min.

Tango of Yearning, Lebanon,1998, 70 min.

Nightfall, Lebanon, 2000, 68 min.

My Heart Beats Only for Her, Lebanon, 2008, 87 min.

The Insomnia of a Serial Dreamer, Lebanon,2020, 170 min.

 

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. The director’s voice is polyphonous, obliquely counter-intuitive. Even when interviewing other people, something Soueid excels at, he is always telling us something about himself. His films are almost devoid of biographical elements and yet radiate visions and fragments of his life. Contrary to dominant trends, inclusivity in the cinema of Mohamed Soueid is not a performance but a reality. Which is why it is pointless to even categorize his films as either fiction or documentary, for their material hospitality makes labels superfluous. 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.

— Curator Giovanni Vimercati

 

The MOHAMED SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE is co-presented by ArteEast, the Arab American National Museum, 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.

 

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