Made in 1969 and released in 1972, Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece is one of the filmmaker’s only two surviving early works. Through this fiction documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a stinging critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s Golden Age (which would end in 1975 with a grueling and protracted civil war). An essay on labor, class, social relations, and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his “manifesto on cinema,” a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage, and an embedded perspective on direct action.
