SOCIAL STUDIES features works by Maher Abi Samra, Marwa Arsanios, Christian Ghazi & Jumana Manna.
This program presents Christian Ghazi’s 1969 film A Hundred Faces for a Single Day in conversation with three films from Lebanon and Palestine made between 2008 and 2016.
Ghazi’s avant-garde cinematic manifesto captures a society at the cusp between Lebanon’s so-called Golden Age and the protracted civil war that would erupt soon after in 1975. Depicting the early days of a revolutionary moment—in which the filmmaker was a participant—that brought Palestinian and Lebanese liberation struggles together with workers’ movements, the film is a scathing critique of Lebanon’s political and cultural bourgeoisie, as well as a warning against neglecting one’s own internal pitfalls.
Decades after Ghazi’s Hundred Faces, the films of Maher Abi Samra, Marwa Arsanios, and Jumana Manna can be said to turn our gaze inwards once again to grapple with a social oblivion conveniently masked by more pressing political concerns. Their films ask how the task of building a shared social consciousness becomes constantly consumed by sectarian divisions, military occupation, and corruption, whereby any kind of social reckoning or emancipation remains a mostly private undertaking. When will such efforts gain entry into politics?
