Movies: Ghassan Salhab

Following on from the 2006 Israeli aggression on Lebanon, the filmmaker tries to film the destruction of Beirut. We witness a city deserted by life, and ghostly characters who, featured in his earlier films, talk about living through such a war....

In Beirut, the destinies of several thirtysomethings (an architect, a tour guide, a mystic, a radio operator, and an exile returned home) collide....

Late in the 1980s it seems like the Lebanese conflict will never end. Khalil returns to Beirut after many years. Ten years earlier, during a battle, he took advantage of the confusion and pretended he was dead....

It's autumn. A man and a woman are about to leave a restaurant situated in the heart of the Lebanese mountains. They are suprised by fighter planes screaming past at low altitude. In the distance, war seems to be breaking out once more. Losing sight ...

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films....

After surviving a car crash in the middle of Lebanon's isolated Beqaa Valley, an amnesiac man finds himself held hostage on a local farm that doubles as an illegal drug-production facility....

“Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything as it is,wrote Maurice Blanchot. Everything.” - Ghassan Salhab. From the southern districts of Beirut to southern Lebanon, a car winds its way through the devastated country. No title for such desol...

In 1975, the Lebanese wars started when Maroun Bagdadi ended his first feature film "Beirutya Beirut". Did the war give an identity to Lebanese cinema? Productions of documentaries, action movies, actor films, co-productions, and emigration. Since 19...

"Riverbed" tells the story of Salma and her returning daughter Thuraya, and their attempt to preserve, maintain and reconstruct their lives with and against each other. Salma survived many years by protecting her independence, she reached her peace t...

In Ghassan Salhab’s recent short filmic poems and political documentaries, he deliberately uses minimal images to make eloquent expressions of the desire for a new reality. As Salhab puts it: “The uprising in Lebanon was seriously starting to run out...

Night falls over Beirut. Fadi, a forty year old, packs his luggage and sets out to the airport with his friend driving him. He is supposed to leave for a month, but instead of going up the plane, he heads to the arrivals section and rents a car. He t...

Yes, you have to scream louder....

In Chinese Ink, composed from a series of shots taken with an iPhone, Salhab expands questions of location and the act of filmmaking itself. Some images were captured in the moment ‘without quite knowing why’, and others were filmed at an earlier tim...

In 1958, in Senegal, land of emigration, Zahia Salhab gave birth to her first child Ghassan. During the same period, Lebanon, their homeland, is driven into a significant local conflict, a preamble to the next civil war....

An interview with Jean-Luc Godard around the time of his film Notre Musique....

A Paleolithic man discovers a mysterious black liquid gurgling from inside his cave. At first contact, he finds himself immersed in a transcendent journey of exploration....

Rosa Luxemburg’s letters from prison form the backbone of Ghassan Salhab’s essayistic collage. Luxemburgs’s lyrical descriptions of nature bear witness to a joie de vivre undimmed by the political situation of the time and are not seen, but rather he...

Each morning Beirut awakens to a new murder seemingly committed by a serial killer, with victims found emptied of their blood. At the same time a doctor, Khalil, begins to experience strange symptoms that destabilise him and transform his life. A con...

Beyrouth, spring 2020. Is the uprising in Lebanon merely on hold?...

If I travel the world from East to West, would it be the same world that I travelled from West to East?...