And by looking in secret at her mother’s notebooks, she begins to fantasize about this past.”įor Hadjithomas, it was the little details that had changed. So it suddenly became very interesting to look at (the archive) through the eyes of a young girl who lives in Canada and imagines the 80s, imagines the war, imagines Lebanon, without any references. ![]() “What was important, for us, was that Joana realized she was remembering something different to what was in her notebooks,” says Joreige. That narrative centers on Maia, a single mother from Montreal, and her daughter Alex, both of whom are suddenly confronted with memories of Maia’s past as a teenager during the Lebanese Civil War. ![]() “Memory Box” is a Lebanese, French, and Canadian co-production. So they took elements from it, including sounds and sentences, combined them with Joreige’s photographs of Lebanon in the 1980s, and began to create a fictional narrative around them. It was then that Hadjithomas and Joreige, who have been working together since 1997, realized the archive had to be made into a film. Eventually, they would return each other’s personal archives. Then, 25 years later, they met again at the opening of Hadjithomas and her partner Khalil Joreige’s “Lebanese Rocket Society” exhibition. This continued for six years before the friends eventually lost contact. On his return, he would bring his daughter’s own tapes and notebooks back and hand them to Hadjithomas. ![]() There was no postal service in Lebanon at the time, so Corrine’s father would take the notebooks and diaries with him every time he visited his family in France. I could read all the events as they happened.” “We recorded tapes, wrote letters, wrote notebooks, and what is very interesting is that they were very, very precise. “We wrote every day from ’82 to ’88,” says Hadjithomas. DUBAI: For years in the 1980s, filmmaker and artist Joana Hadjithomas corresponded with her best friend Corinne in Paris from war-torn Beirut.
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