Beirut: Memory in Layers, in Pieces

Two works pay homage to life in Beirut and excavate the city's ever-changing cultural tides.

Msaytbeh, the elevated place. (2024)
Dir. Rawane Nassif
20min, DCP

After a twenty-year absence, Rawane Nassif returns home to Msaytbeh, Beirut. Msaytbeh, (derived from the word mastaba, meaning “the elevated place”) was home to a loving and diverse neighborhood of secular leftists. Upon her return, Rawane realizes that the life and community she left behind has drastically changed.

Tango of Yearning (1998)
Dir. Mohamad Soueid
70min, Digital

In Arabic with English subtitles

The first installment in an autobiographical trilogy of experimental documentaries by Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soueid, Tango of Yearning is a rapturous story of desire and loss. With stunning intimacy, he revels in an experience of obsessive love and the heartbreak that inevitably follows. His anguish is interlaced with the grief of the civil war and mourning the changing face of Beirut, while also—as a true cinephile—offering an elegy to history of the city’s cinema culture. Soueid’s narrative of grief yet has room for humor and stylistic playfulness, as he mixes in affectionate interviews, charmingly illogical sequences, intricate montage, and documentation of wartime Beirut.