One Hundred Faces for a Single Day

Cinematographer: Youssef Antar , Ahmad Mohsen

Screenwriter: Christian Ghazi and Rafiq Hajjar

Producer: Smakya Film and Partners

Executive Producer: Nadim Suleiman

Languages:

Composer: Stockhausen

Editor: Kais Al Zubaydi

Animator: Naji Obeid

Production Design: Bahjat Haydar

Sound Design: Zuheir Fehmi

Music: Stockhausen Hamnen and Concerto Rodrigo Larn Khaus

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. 

Christian Ghazi
Born in 1934 in Antakya, Turkey to a Lebanese father and a French mother, Christian Ghazi grew up in Syria and then settled with his family in Lebanon in 1939 where he studied, worked, and lived. He made dozens of films in Lebanon, mostly centered on the struggles of resistance fighters, refugee camp dwellers, tobacco farmers, and factory workers. His first twelve documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in 1964 were all banned and burned for being subversive. In1988, his entire body of work was destroyed when militia fighters broke into his home and burned all his film negatives. Disgusted, he quit making movies. Christian realized the documentary Coffin of the Memory (2001) when a copy of A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1972) was recovered in Syria and returned to him. In addition to making films, Ghazi also worked as a journalist, taught philosophy, wrote poems, directed plays, and composed music. He died in 2013. A copy of another of his early works, Resistance, Why (1971) was recently recovered and re-released earlier this year.

Christian Ghazi

Born in 1934 in Antakya, Turkey to a Lebanese father and a French mother, Christian Ghazi grew up in Syria and then settled with his family in Lebanon in 1939 where he studied, worked, and lived. He made dozens of films in Lebanon, mostly centered on the struggles of resistance fighters, refugee camp dwellers, tobacco farmers, and factory workers. His first twelve documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in 1964 were all banned and burned for being subversive. In1988, his entire body of work was destroyed when militia fighters broke into his home and burned all his film negatives. Disgusted, he quit making movies. Christian realized the documentary Coffin of the Memory (2001) when a copy of A Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1972) was recovered in Syria and returned to him. In addition to making films, Ghazi also worked as a journalist, taught philosophy, wrote poems, directed plays, and composed music. He died in 2013. A copy of another of his early works, Resistance, Why (1971) was recently recovered and re-released earlier this year.

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