Rania Stephan, Senior Fellow Iméra, is organising an evening of short films followed by a discussion on speculative fiction in Lebanon at the Videodrome 2 cinema on Friday 20 June 2025 at 8.30 pm.
Carte blanche on speculative fiction from Lebanon
Friday June 20th, 8:30pm at the Videodrome 2 cinema (49 Cours Julien, 13006 Marseille)
“If the imaginary world of science fiction is all too often colonised by the great champions of neo-liberalism, how can science fiction resist? In contrast to the spectacular or dominant super-productions, here it produces parallel worlds, gaps and contaminations based on a joy in the making of cinema in its relationship to time, editing, framing, the archive and the invention that the economy of means allows.
How is science fiction written in Lebanon? Why this shift in terminology from science fiction to speculative fiction? What does it mean in cinematic terms? And in terms of worlds?
This programme offers a few avenues of exploration, from the fantasies of outer space to the underground networks of our sewers, in a variety of modes of writing, but with the effrontery to think that cinema is indeed a way of translating what we call reality into justice”.
Claire Lasolle, programmer at Videodrome 2.
Programme
In the Moon Race of the 1950s, the sense of space expansion was underpinned by a domestic sphere anchored around the television set. Women were anchored within this domestic framework, while men could take off to explore space. It took several decades for women to be sent into space on an equal footing.
The first woman to go to the Moon in a fictional film was Fritz Lang’s Woman on the Moon (1929). As soon as she stepped off the spaceship and set foot on the Moon, she set up her camera and began filming. But it hasn’t happened yet. To date, no woman has set foot on the Moon. Despite the considerable progress made in space science and travel, the distance between the reality of space science and science fiction remains fascinating. In this work, science fiction films and TV series are mixed with real instructions given to today’s astronauts, who spend hours painstakingly screwing in bolts to repair highly sophisticated space stations.
Drawn entirely from an old Egyptian science fiction film called The Master of Time, directed by Kamal el Sheikh in 1987, which tells the story of an enlightened scientist who wants to prolong human life, Threshold is built on the intuition that if the original film were emptied of all its fictional elements, retaining only the transitional shots featuring doors, portals and border crossings, it would reveal its quintessence: its obsession with eternity. Although the plot is evacuated from the film, enough fiction infiltrates for the viewer to grasp the narrative threads. The viewer joins the main character, Mr Kamel, in finding himself trapped in both space and time, thus fulfilling the scientist’s prophecy.
From her manor house, a young filmmaker unearths Manivelle, an automaton donated to Lebanon in 1945. As it wanders around Beirut, the robot tells its tumultuous story, which is also that of its country.
A number of mysterious objects appear in different locations. Inside are white contact lenses that offer views of a distant world. After trying them on, three people describe what they saw and felt.
Guided by the illustrations of a botanist, two women search Beirut for a hidden garden, invisible to the eye. The garden cannot be located; it is in fact everywhere and nowhere at the same time. As the city unfolds and the sometimes frantic camera picks up shots, the garden comes into view. Plants burst into the frames and into the city. The filmmaker is looking for what remains here, what lives beyond the city or perhaps what lived before it or would live under it. As the film progresses, Beirut comes across to us at times like the city we would find after a disaster, after some distant destruction. A city where life is returning, where the holes left by the explosions have been filled in by perennial plants. The camera searches, scrutinises and gradually suggests that we see the plants as strange creatures or apparitions. They can climb, crawl and survive anywhere. A strange suspense builds up as the two protagonists search for a feline creature that has appeared among the flowers of Beirut.The plants themselves take on the anxieties of this city, which has draped itself in a new vision: the reassuring plants have become conspirators and are beginning a slow mutation. This suspense raises questions about the future. And while gardens are refuges for dissidents, resistance fighters, the wanted or those trying to flee, who can you trust in the hedged city? Who is really invading Beirut? Can a garden explode? Or is it the stems of this aloe that form the frozen image of an explosion? Can this garden be a refuge for this city and this film, the search for a truce?
(Clémence Arrivé – Cinéma du réel)
In Resilience Overflow, the development of a bacterial strain genetically modified to produce the resilience gene raises questions about possible alliances between the human and the microbiological, in collaboration with the Environmental Molecular Microbiology Laboratory at the National Centre for Biotechnology in Madrid. The bacteria, isolated from the artist’s intestine, are genetically modified to incorporate and produce human neuropeptide Y, a gene linked to human resilience, and become a microscopic drug production factory. The project speculates on the release of the strain into Beirut’s water system, questioning resilience as a political pretext and examining the role of the individual in the absence of the state, as well as possible modes of alliance between the human and microbiological worlds.
