Film Archive

Jahr

Land (Film Archive)

International Competition 2022
Filmstill Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist
Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist
Corine Shawi
Corine Shawi’s father spends four years in various hospitals – a time in which the state of emergency becomes routine. A description of a status quo and a testimony to resignation and renewal.
Filmstill Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist

Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist

Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist
Corine Shawi
International Competition 2022
Documentary Film
Lebanon
2022
73 minutes
Arabic,
French
Subtitles: 
English

Corine Shawi’s father spends four years in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities in Beirut because of sudden paralysis – a time in which the state of emergency becomes routine and filming becomes a strategy: in search of the right balance of closeness and distance, in search of one’s own position in the structure. Shawi sets herself the task of documenting, putting herself in the picture, keeping the family together and at the same time recording movements and changes.

Family life shifts to the sickrooms. The radio plays, the mother smokes countless cigarettes on the balcony, her eyes and fingers graze figures of saints, she attends Holy Mass in the various facilities and shares her worries about an adult son with her husband and daughter. They argue, laugh and sometimes dance around the sickbed. Between the family capsule and drifting through the city – Beirut, night, cemeteries, sensualities –, the filmmaker inserts interview sequences with her siblings, staged on the backseat of a moving car. Attempts to cope and to draw borders, loneliness in company. Brief moments when wishes and projections of mobility are experimentally translated into virtual space – a gauging of possibilities. A touching description of a status quo and a testimony to resignation and renewal.
Djamila Grandits

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Corine Shawi
Cinematographer
Corine Shawi
Editor
Halim Sabbagh, Corine Shawi
Producer
Myriam Sassine, Corine Shawi
Co-Producer
Jana Wehbe
Sound
Lama Sawaya
Score
Joh Dagher
Nominated for: Prize of the Interreligious Jury, FIPRESCI Prize
International Competition 2020
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The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi
Laura Citarella, Mercedes Halfon
When the poet Juana Bignozzi dies, she bequeaths the intellectual property of her work to the young author Mercedes, along with prosaic but even more poetic duties.
Media Name: 76bc29c9-5260-47d9-9e98-4663b3d9c8f3.jpg

The Poets Visit Juana Bignozzi

Las poetas visitan a Juana Bignozzi
Laura Citarella, Mercedes Halfon
International Competition 2020
Documentary Film
Argentina
2019
90 minutes
Spanish
Subtitles: 
English, German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing

A poet’s life ends and a film begins to carry on her legacy, prosaically at first. When Juana Bignozzi dies in 2015, the intellectual property rights to her work pass to the young author Mercedes Halfon – as the aged lady had decreed. But Mercedes also inherits a refrigerator and a lot of junk that must be cleared out of the orphaned apartment in Buenos Aires. Together with young filmmakers, she transforms the duty into a poetically fulfilling project.

The result is not only an unusual but actually a non-portrait of a poet – and perhaps not even a result. Rather, it is a continuously growing equation of superimposed faces, texts and images that refuses to simply work out. They look at each other as if in rear-view mirrors: Juana Bignozzi, who speaks to the young from her writings full of humble reverence, and her young female admirers who, reading, filming and browsing through Bignozzi’s legacy, feel almost embarrassed by these declarations of love. What confidence the deceased had in them! What tremendous expectations she had of those whose mother or grandmother she could have been! Their own poetic achievements seem too half-hearted to Mercedes and Laura to ever live up to such advance praise. But even as they doubt, they are already deep into it.
Sylvia Görke

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Laura Citarella, Mercedes Halfon
Cinematographer
Inés Duacastella, Agustín Mendilaharzu
Editor
Miguel de Zuviría, Alejo Moguillansky
Producer
Ingrid Pokropek
Sound
Valeria Fernández, Marcos Canosa
Winner of: Silver Dove (International Competition)