71/ Bearing Witness to What is Lost: Lebanon’s ‘Postwar’ Hauntings (with Ely Dagher)

This is a conversation with Lebanese director Ely Dagher. He is the director of the Palme D’Or-winning Waves ’98, one of my favorite short films. He also has an upcoming feature film called The Sea Ahead.

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Topics discussed:

• Waves ’98
• The image of the city
• The 2015 ‘You Stink’ Lebanon uprising: context/background
• The feeling of history repeating itself: Waves ’98 features the 1998 waste crisis which led to the 2015 waste crisis (which led to the uprising)
• Inter-generational anxiety: ‘I don’t want to end up like them’
• On resilience and why it’s a failed notion
• The ‘ghostly figure’ in literature and movies, including in Lebanon
• Haunting from the future, the feel of being stuck (permanent liminality)
• The post-August 2020 port of Beirut moment
• Interesting comparisons between Lebanon and Hong Kong, and their relationship with the past and future
• How do we live day to day while also being in a state of anxiety? (his upcoming film)
• How Beirut is portrayed in Waves ’98 and how Beirut has changed since the 90s
• The relationship to the city and the sea in Beirut
• Beirut as a ghost town
• Hauntings in Waves ’98 and in real life; cyclical hauntings
• Our peculiar relationship with Television
• Our complicated relationship with the sea growing up in post-1990s Lebanon
• The politics of decay (my essay on the topic)
• war/post-war vs war/not-war
• The anticipation of violence
• ‘wartime’
• Is there a way out of that cyclical haunting?

Recommended Books & Movies

• The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
• Persona by Ingmar Bergman
• Caché by Michael Haneke

The music is by Tarabeat.