طرس،_ رحلة الصعود الى المرئي

Chosen by Metropolis Art Cinema

The screening will be introduced by Rabih El-Khoury

In his debut filmmaker Ghassan Halwani seeks to understand and find answers to the fate of the 17,000 citizens who disappeared in his country’s brutal civil war. At a time when Lebanon refuses to deal with its own stigmas and seeks instead to erase them through the archaic politics of oblivion, Halwani revisits the deadly war and Lebanese collective memory through the perspective of the missing ones. To excavate the past, he deploys archival practices and animation as a way to give life to memory. Erased,__ Ascent of the Invisible seeks to (re)trace history by questioning absence.
Indeed, Halwani’s film and Metropolis Cinema seek to explore a common ground: how do we deal with archives within an absence of images? Through the project Cinematheque Beirut, Metropolis attempts to preserve Lebanese and Arab film heritage to make it accessible both locally and internationally. Halwani belongs to an emerging generation of talented Lebanese filmmakers and artists who are challenging the status-quo by addressing the past in order to give their present a meaning. Metropolis’ mission is to encourage and support such crucial initiatives. (HM)

Rabih El-Khoury is a Lebanese film curator based in Berlin. He is a member of the administrative board of the Metropolis Association.