This film double bill opens with Christian Ghazi’s The Hundred Faces of One Day (1972) an avant-garde film of Palestinian resistance fighters. It is followed by 2017 documentary A Feeling Greater Than Love which uncovers the history of factory protests in 1970s Lebanon. The selected films are a mixture of experimental, sometimes disturbing and very creative, innovative styles. They challenge exotic and neo-Orientalist representations derived from old imperial traditions and reinvent new ways of dealing with ancient struggles, history and memory.This film screening is part of a series curated by Olivier Hadouchi.

The Hundred Faces of One Day is the avant-garde masterwork that challenged the limits of political film in the revolutionary period. Rejecting all propagandistic or narrative convention, Ghazi combined documentary and abstract sequences with a series of discontinuous plot lines to organise a stinging attack on the bourgeois decadence of Beirut’s political milieu.

In her directorial debut, A Feeling Greater Than Love, Mary Jirmanus Saba deals with a forgotten revolution, saving from oblivion bloodily suppressed strikes at Lebanese tobacco and chocolate factories. These events from the 1970s, which held the promise of a popular revolution and, with it, of women’s emancipation were erased from collective memory by the country’s civil wars. Rich in archival footage from Lebanon’s militant cinema tradition, the film reconstructs the spirit of that revolt, asking of the past how we might transform the present.

Olivier Hadouchi is an independent researcher and film curator with a PhD in Cinema Studies. He writes regularly for film magazines and journals including CinémAction, Mondes du Cinéma and Third Text. In 2017, he curated a film program for Museum Reina Sofia (Madrid), ZdB (Lisbon) and Bandits-Mages (Bourges). He often works with film Festivals and was a member of the Jury at « Documentary » in Beirut (2013) and in Algiers (2015). He has contributed texts to a number of books including; Filmmakers of the World, Unite ! (edited by Tereza Stejskalová Tranzit/Prague), Chris Marker L’homme-monde (edited by Christine Van Assche, Raymond Bellour) and Solidarity with Algerian Independance from the reporters from Ex-Yugoslavia as a booklet for MoCab (Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade).