Mohamed Soueid Retrospective: Movie Series

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. 

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.

MOHAMAD SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE

MOHAMED SOUEID RETROSPECTIVE

Online Screening: March 3-13

Free / $5 suggested donation

RSVP at artearchive.org

CINEMA FOUAD

1994, 41 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.

“A documentary on the life and ambitions of a young Lebanese cross-dresser, the video follows her journey from soldier to cabaret dancer in an effort to raise funds for her sex change operation. Shot in Beirut, CINEMA FOUAD weaves a complex and multi-layered story of sexuality, identity, and desire, and paints a compelling portrait of its subject.”

–THIRD WORLD NEWSREEL

TANGO OF YEARNING

1998, 70 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.

One of Soueid’s finest and most representative cinematographic achievements, TANGO OF

YEARNING melancholically exemplifies the relational essence of his cinema. It is at once a film about love (for cinema, for life and its characters), about Soueid’s work for the Lebanese state broadcaster Tele Liban, and about the mysterious death of the Egyptian Jewish actress Camelia.

The film’s sinuous and free-flowing shape is not so much a rejection of the linear narratives of realism, but an acknowledgment of reality’s unmoored dynamics and the role memory plays in

its construction.

NIGHTFALL / INDAMA YA’ATI AL-MASA

2000, 68 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.

“On the surface, NIGHTFALL is a semi-autobiographical reconstruction of the militant years of Fatah’s Student Brigade; a series of conversations and interviews between the director and his

old comrades, most of whom spend their time meditating their movement’s defeat in a state of drunken incoherence. Throughout NIGHTFALL, Soueid remains uncompromisingly bleak about the state of the Palestinian revolution at the turn of the new millennium. It is not just the individual militants who now suffer from a crisis of identity, but the very slogans of the struggle

itself – and thus, its history. What is to be recovered, then, from the ramblings of these old Maoists?”

– Francesco Anselmetti, SAFAR JOURNAL

MY HEART BEATS ONLY FOR HER / MA HATAFTU LI GHAYRIHA

2008, 87 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Through the story of a son reconstructing his father’s revolutionary past from a diary, Soueid draws a portrait of two generations of men, fathers and sons, who were revolutionaries of the 1970s. This is a poetic flight in time, back to when young men dreamed of changing the world

with their own hands, and forward to a present where young men just want the security of a salaried job. At the same time, MY HEART BEATS ONLY FOR HER is a film about Lebanon’s schizophrenic modern history, caught in between the neoliberal lure of financial capitalism and the internationalist dreams of revolution. Between its sudden kindness and unforeseen brutality.

Between Hong Kong and Hanoi.

THE INSOMNIA OF A SERIAL DREAMER

2020, 170 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Soueid’s magnus opus, a gargantuan flux that is both timeless and multi-temporal, THE

INSOMNIA OF A SERIAL DREAMER amalgamates the past into the present, and from the schizophrenic streets of Beirut opens onto the world: the world that a Middle East Airlines captain has traveled and now remembers from his patio, but also the world of boundless love one of Soueid’s friends has for the Egyptian singer and actress Souad Hosny. In order to fall asleep, the director asked his friends and artistic accomplices to tell him stories, resulting in a film of rarefied, oneiric beauty.