Lost Paradise

Reine Mitri / Lebanon / 2017 / International Premiere / 61 min.

synopsis

The life of the filmmaker, also the film’s main character, is determined by a double fear. On one side, her world collapses under the weight of personal and historical tragedies, on the other she is threatened by the loss of the memories of everything that is dear to her. In this documentary, which blurs the lines between personal and public, she attempts to preserve all traces of memories, whether they’re images of her deceased husband or the ruins of local Beirut monuments. Slowly flowing images, virtually free of musical accompaniment, give memory fragments emerging from the surfaces of material things, including the heroine’s body, space to have spontaneous effect.

"This film evolves around the notions of disappearance and loss: individual death and disappearance of places, loss of personal memory and collective memory. " R. Mitri

biography

Reine Mitri (1970) is a Lebanese documentary director and producer. The key theme of her work to date is memory, both personal and collective. In her work, she also captures the memory of place, in particular that of Beirut, which the local government has the tendency to suppress. Her film In This Land Lay Graves of Mine (2014), about the legacy of the Lebanese civil war, earned her a censorship ban.