74 (Istiaadat Li Nidal)
Rania Rafei
Lebanon | 2012 | 100 min
Language : Arabic
Subtitle : English
Recalling the year of student protests at the American University of Beirut, the film creates an experimental space revisiting the struggles of 1974, in a personal and post-modern style, by contrasting them with contemporary revolutions. The singular process used for this remake makes it a work more interested in asking questions than finding answers.
This film is inspired by two events that shaped the filmmaker: his birth in Dakar, Senegal, host country to his parents, and the internal tensions in Lebanon, signs of the civil war to come. These happened on the same date, inspiring the title of this medium-length film. Ghassan Salhab, a major figure on the Lebanese film scene, presents a work that the viewer has to penetrate layer by layer, grasping a complex patchwork of visual and acoustic musings and impressions. The narrative rhythm immerses us in the past with, as an example, images of the US military intervention in July 1958, to sharpen our perspective and invite us to question the present. A love of life opposes a destructive movement: a man's origins, as well as those of a nation, are compared and questioned in the context of exile, belonging and politics. The present here goes beyond the notion of time and becomes a state of mind, exploring the immense human territories in which “I”, “you” and “we” resonate as though part of polyphony.
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