Lebanon, I love you
Published on
Real “coup de Coeur” of this beginning of Festival, Je veux voir (I Want To See) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige is a little cinematographic pearl all in smoothness and sensibility. Screened at “Un Certain regard”, this docu-drama sends Catherine Deneuve (as herself) to the south of Lebanon, a region destroyed by the recent war.
Accompanied by Rabih, a young man who comes back to his homeland, she travels across the ruins of a nation, disappeared forever.
Filmed with a sense of emergency and using the documentary conditions, Je veux voir moves the spectator by its sincerity about the Lebanese realities it describes. Beyond the subject hardness (the permanent danger – the mines, the threat of the neighboring countries - Rabih’s sadness in his completely destroyed childhood village), the docu-drama shines by an image, which is near to the perfection. The camera of Hadjithomas and Joreige unions glances on the devastated landscape while trying to reinvent unceasingly its visual angles. The images are beautiful and strong at the same time; the directors manage to superimpose these sad and disconcerted sights which reveal the Lebanese reality of the buildings fallen in ruins that one recycles.
Je veux voir is a strong movie. And it is even much stronger with the light on the contemporary situation of Lebanon at the edge of the civil war.
Aurélie
Je veux voir directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (with Catherine Deneuve, Rabih Mroué, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige,...) “Un certain regard”