“The Griffith Criterion indicates a maximal constraint beyond which a material would break.”

Lebanon, present times. Three women play out their strengths and weaknesses, their fears, their resistance to the world's jolts and barbarisms, their paradoxes and eventual resources to avoid breaking.

From the sewers to the stars, from Paris to Beirut, going through Arizona, those modern day witches put forth their questions, and the fringes where their bodies and imaginations roam.

In this part of the world, where a woman's role is strictly regulated (her image, her consumption habits, her group, her role of mother and spouse), it appeared vital to address cases of women who do not fit the norms, reject them even and invent their lives in a quest for freedom, however excluded or fringed they become. We intend to show these women's intense power while, a few centuries ago (and still today in some countries), they would have been burnt for witchcraft.

Le Critère de Griffith premiered in STATION BEIRUT, a space dedicated to visual arts, founded and directed since September 2013 by Nabil Canaan and Leila Alaoui. 

The audience is seated all around the the performance area on simple benches and can also move around to choose its point of view. The performance involves live music, contemporary dance, video and text in three languages (Lebanese dialect, English and French), and is destined to galleries, museums, factories, raw spaces, rather than to a theatre.

“We’re covered with impermeable skin and our eyes are turned outwards. How easy it is to forget what we’re made of.
 Events of loss remind us that we are our body while our body isn’t only our own.”

Shot in the Fayoum Western desert and the Red Sea coast in Egypt, and the volcanic Greek island of Nisyros among other places, this film is weaved by a quest to the unknown, where memory seldom interferes, to which the spirit is drawn. A quest in which the material world whispers the way to the dark rooms of the immaterial world.

“A poetic tour de force exploring how life and death meet in the folded depths of the waters. It moves across eerie landscapes from the silent Mediterranean, where Egyptair MS804 disappeared in 2016 with all its passengers, to the interiors of the filmmaker’s own body and the phenomena of childbirth.” (Laura U. Marks for the Millenium Film Journal)

Credits

Director : Kinda Hassan | Text written by Kinda Hassan and Lina Attalah | Camera and Editing: Kinda Hassan | Music: Nada el Shazly | Color Grading and Editing Consultancy: Louly Seif | Sound editing and mixing: Adham Zidan | Production : YAZAN | With the support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC)

Technical details

Format: Color, 16:9 , 1920x1080, 25p | Length: 19 minutes 50 seconds | Languages: Arabic and French with English Subtitles

Touring

• Panorama des cinémas du Maghreb et du Moyen-Orient - Paris [2018]

• “Bodycheck” - mumok museum - Vienne [2018]

• Millennium Film Journal 66 - New York [2017]

• 15° Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris [2017]

• 21ST JI.HLAVA International Documetary Film Festival - Prague [2017] 

• Lago Film Festival - “Disorientation” - Revine Lago - Italy [2017]

• 63. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen - Germany [2017]

• Beirut Cinema Days - Lebanon [2017]

• Cairo Cinema Days - Egypt [2017] 

Rim : Do you think there’s a sort of curse hanging upon us?

Al Beyt is a realistic play about a brother and his two sisters in their thirties who have just lost their mother and who deal differently the family house’s fate, as well as the stories they share from the past. Nadia, the oldest sister, has remained faithful to her mother and duties, whereas Rim, the younger sister, is struggling between freedom and family ties. Their brother is witnessing what he dislikes more: conflict, and, as the play unfolds, the truth that inevitably arises. 

Credits

Author: Arzé Khodr | Director: Caroline Hatem | Light Design : Rayan Al Nihawi | Original music : Rabih Gebeile | CAST : Yara Abou Haidar, Jessy Khalil, Tarek Yaacoub  or Ehab Shaaban | Production : YAZAN |With the support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), the Lebanese Ministry of Culture and Bankers Assurances.