Mohamed Soueid - FSS workshop series
Date and time
Description
MOHAMED SOUEID - FSS WORKSHOP SERIES
An Introduction to documentary practice and history of documentary filmmaking in the Arab World
Open to 20 participants: in priority film students and cinephiles.
PROGRAMME
Morning Session (2,5 hours):
- Introduction in the form of an imagination exercise to the picture and what does it mean “Looking at a Picture”
- Introduction to the documentary filmmaking history within the cinema history, supported by screenings of short films from the silent era.
- Through the aforementioned screenings we will examine the significance of the documentary as a nucleus part of film language.
Afternoon Session (2,5 hours):
- Through screenings of different selected short films, this session is intended to provide a brief history tracing the evolution of documentary genres and trends that shaped the documentary landscape in the Arab world.
- A series of films made by selected Arab directors, in addition to short silent documentaries showing the Arab world as seen by the West.
About Mohamed Soueid
Lebanese filmmaker based in Dubai, UAE.
“Born in 1959 in Beirut, Soueid is too young to be the godfather of Beirut’s current contemporary art scene, but he is a serious contender for the role of elder statesman. There was a time when he was frequently lumped into “the group” of artists, writers, and filmmakers from Lebanon who have become known internationally over the past decade. Soueid’s films were programmed into some of the seminal showcase events — Catherine David’s ‘Contemporary Arab Representations’ at the Witte de With in 2002; ‘Possible Narratives’ organized by Christine Tohme and Akram Zaatari for Videobrasil in 2003; ‘Beyond Truth and Fiction’ in Cairo in 2005 — that served to crystallize and codify the Beirut scene.
Soueid is widely regarded as Beirut’s first video artist, the pioneer and progenitor of the wide-ranging, deeply probing visual experimentation that has made the city such a hub for video production over the last twenty years. After years of working as a film critic and an assistant director on commercial films, Soueid made his first independent video in 1990. Al-Ghiyab (“Absence”) delves into the stories of four people who lost friends or relatives during the civil war in Lebanon, though their deaths were pointedly unrelated to the conflict.”
Text by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 2010, Bidoun
