editorial

It has been a year or two now that we are hearing the same question in the European cinema circles: ‘what’s the use of festivals?’

A typical existential question when one lives in a country where the art house film scenes are flourishing, where television programs rock, and where DVD catalogues are filled with long lost masterpieces.

When you sum up all the above, you end up with a head spinning range of films. So, you’ll be asking yourself: is there still a point to go out and discover a movie at a festival?

However, when one lives in a country where the art house film scene is rare, where tv programs lack substance and where information on the avant-garde cinema is difficult to find, the existence of a film festival becomes a necessity.

Even more so when you know that this country breeds a young, strong, vivid cinematography with an ever growing number of cinematographers, documentary makers, visual artists who create video art or animated films and, they all crave for one thing: that their work of art be given the opportunity to be seen once or more in a year. A rendezvous that would allow them to meet with other cinematographers who come from different cinematographic backgrounds.

The Lebanese cinematographic scene is not a mirage, nor is it a journalistic invention. Film directors will no doubt put the following assertion in doubt – don’t they know better than anyone else the solitude that surrounds the act of writing? : There have never been as many movie shootings in Lebanon and never have there been as many Lebanese making films throughout the world. In a country no bigger than 10.452 km2, there undoubtedly exists a scene, with its connections, its common questionings, its emulations, its collaborations and, yes, its jealousies. And a scene needs one or more theaters, one or more representations in order to exist. ..né.à Beyrouth is one of them. For the seventh time.

We’re not going to fall into the game of revealing the main tendencies that hold the films together. We could tell you – after having viewed a large number of selected films - that the specter of the war is slowly disappearing this year and that more than one cinematographer seems to turn the focus on the way life is moving on.

We could summarize the tendency using the title of Rossellini’s beautiful film: Beyrouth Anno Uno. It would sound glamorous; however it would also be purely artificial. Once again, the secret thread of the Festival will reveal itself on its own, during the projections, at the crossroad of the selected movies. Together, we shall see the underlying links surfacing, undressing before our eyes as an echo to what we have collectively been feeling.

Finally, ..né.à Beyrouth carries on the tradition which had been interrupted due to the 2006 war: interweaving its selection of Lebanese productions with the work of a foreign cinematographer. This year, the Festival has invited Lodge Kerrigan.

Lodge is the man behind an incomparable work of art: three movies only, in a period of fifteen years, yet three movies so intense that they influence you forever. Lodge Kerrigan (44 years-old, born in New York) is an extraordinary minimalist when it comes to narration, deleting, as his work advances, the superfluous to his story in order to reach the permanent tension which characterizes his work.

It is not a wonder that these intense flowing movies are named after the main character: Kerrigan asks the viewer to be Keane, to be Claire Dolan for two hours, to bear their mental cracks, their fears. You cannot understand these characters unless you travel within them.

Therefore, Lodge Kerrigan is today the contemporary cinematographer that has explored the furthest the notion of character in cinema, going as far as abolishing the wall which separates the viewer from the hero of the movie. This makes him an offspring of modern cinema – of Bergman and Antonioni, who could read the unconscious through faces – yet with a sense of a very physical and impressive mise-en-scene, which in turn sets him immediately back in the great history of American cinema. What you’ll feel during the projection is nothing less than a true experience. His presence in Lebanon this year is a gift.

Philippe Azoury