city

 A building on the outskirts of Tunis, built by Italians in 1905, was transformed into a special refuge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight residents of various origins have taken shelter here, living in isolation from their loved ones and the rest of the city, from which they are also culturally distant. The filmmakers capture their nomadic existence not only in interviews, revealing the peculiarities of these unique personalities, but also in poetically stylized sequences that give the house an almost magical dimension of a transitional, mystical space. The result is an impressionistic mosaic themed around loneliness and life within physical and symbolic barriers that become a source of melancholy, frustration, and uncertainty. At the same time, however, isolation and the breakdown of concepts of time and social norms become an opportunity to build islands of freedom and self-discovery that could never happen under normal social circumstances.  “Let your mind concentrate on the body. Let your mind concentrate on emotions. Your mind goes to another place. Let it go. But try to be an observer. An observer in all situations.” 

Documentary filmmaker Karel Malkoun comes from Lebanon, but has been living in Canada for the past few years. In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life. Malkoun has created an immediate, raw, and deliberately unsorted impression capturing the absurdity and suddenness of situations that took her by surprise as a native returning from abroad. “They got married in the war, they had us in the war. We grew up in the war. Went to school in the war. Got married and had our kids, in the war. And also we will die, in the war. Regardless of whether it is an economical war or an actual war.”