Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
I see The Fourth Stage as a relation between cinema and magic. Its starting point comes from my childhood, actually, when you go back to your memory, where you lived and the experiences of that period. When I was young, I used to work with a magician, touring with him as his assistant, helping him, mainly making the music effects, and that gave me access to see all the tricks that this magician used to do. We used to tour in small villages in the south of Lebanon, in public places or small stages, at schools or squares; now I’m a filmmaker. And this tool which we all know, cinema, has a long history with illusion. The disappearance of the magician is an excuse for entering a deepened concept of understanding where is the magic now, where is the illusion nowadays: how has it been replaced by another illusion? How has it been replaced by mythology? And how mythology and illusion work together, if they work together? That aligned with the idea that there is a huge wave of religion and myth in the sense that people want to believe in something else, something bigger, due of course to the political situation that we are all living in the Middle East and in the context of the South in general.
I am from the south of Lebanon, therefore I’m from the South of the world. And reading history, you discover that there were different perspectives on what republic, democracy mean, and all those classical theories coming from the West. That was also my starting point: what was going on in the South? So, going back to a specific South, the south of Lebanon, I started to dig into the meaning of the land as we know it, and the whole South as we see it.