Ashkal Alwan and the Sursock Museum are pleased to invite you to the film screenings ofCongress of Idling Persons by filmmaker Bassem Saad andRed is The Color of My Eye by filmmaker Nisrine Khodr. These screenings are part of a longer film program in parallel with the exhibition Home Works 9: Intimate Garden Scene (in Beirut).

Congress of Idling Persons
Dir. Bassem Saad, 2022
36’, Lebanon
In Arabic with English subtitles

The film features five interlocutors who play themselves and greater fictions, in the shadows of recent world-historical events. Artist and writer Bassem Saad, DJ and translator Rayyan Abdel Khalek, musical artist Sandy Chamoun, writer Islam Khatib, and organizer Mekdes Yilma examine a cartography of protest, crisis, humanitarian and mutual aid, migrant labor, and Palestinian outsider status. Punctuated by the late Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter revolts of 2020, and the Beirut Port explosion, the film weaves through transhistorical constants-from rage and mourning to spontaneity and besiegement- propelled by the speech and acts of its performers. If a group action is a riot and not a revolution, then who films it? If four is a riot, it is also a congress.  

Bassem Saad (b. 1994, Lebanon) is an artist and writer. Their work explores notions of historical rupture, spontaneity, and surplus, through film, performance, and sculpture, alongside essays and fiction. Within an emphasis on past and present forms of struggle, they attempt to place scenes of intersubjective exchange within their world historical frames.

Red is The Color of My Eye
Dir. Nisrine Khodr, 2000
23’, Lebanon
In Arabic with English subtitles

“Two concierges of Hamra street, two buildings of Hamra, the two sides of the street, two dimensions: time and space; memory and territoriality, They have been keeping their building for the past 20 years, they watch over them, watch people coming in and out of them, watch the people on the street, watch the street. They spend a good deal of their time in the space between the building and the street, they do not live and no one lives in the buildings they keep”

Nisrine Khodr (b. 1973, Lebanon) works across film, performance, and installation. She has produced and conceived cultural shows for television, recorded voice-overs, and performed in various films and plays. Her recent works include Rear Basin (2023), Common Threads (2023), and Tahrik (2018).