Doha Film Institute
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On Fatima’s wedding day in southern Lebanon, war breaks out. Her husband documents the front, and their photojournalist friend goes missing in Gaza. Through all three cameras, she questions love, absence and images in wartime.
October 2023. Fatima and Hasan marry in southern Lebanon on the very day war erupts in Gaza. On the way to the wedding party, Hasan tells Fatima that their close friend Nidal, a photojournalist in Gaza, has disappeared. Fatima cries, then wipes her tears and rejoins her family to dance. The following morning, the war spreads to the Lebanese border. Hasan leaves to document the front in the southern villages. Fatima stays alone in their new apartment in Beirut, the camera she used at the wedding now her daily companion. She films the funerals held nearby for those killed in the South, demonstrations in the city, and searches every image coming out of Gaza for a trace of Nidal. Through her images, Hasan’s frontline documentation and Nidal’s still photographs from before, Fatima confronts a question she cannot resolve: what do images do in times of war, when massacres are documented daily and the world does not move?

Credits

Director
Fatima Joumaa
Screenwriter
Fatima Joumaa
Producer
Fatima Joumaa, Manon Lavaud
Production Company
Studio Morabaa, Muja Films

About the Director

fatima joumaa
Fatima Joumaa is a young Lebanese filmmaker and photographer trained at IESAV, USJ, Lebanese University and the Université d’été of La Fémis. She began her career exploring the boundaries between fiction and reality in her first shorts, ‘Film Title’ and ‘Our Beautiful Eyes’, exploring the theme of her identity and that of Lebanese women around her, and addressing subjects such as exile, memory, ar

Producers

Manon Lavaud

Manon Lavaud is a French producer, director and screenwriter of Haitian origin. Trained at Les Films D’Ici, she worked as a production assistant on around thirty films. In 2022, she returned to Marseille and co-founded, with Dhia Jerbi, the Franco-Tunisian company Muja Films, dedicated to filmmakers from the Global South and their diasporas. Alongside this, she works as a screenwriter and is developing her first film, ‘Return To Sender’, which explores her Haitian roots.