Film short abstract:

Hymns from the Dead is a multimodal exploration of the war on drugs in the Philippines, delving into the interplay of images and sound to narrate stories of state-sponsored violence.

Film long abstract:

Hymns from the Dead is a multimodal exploration of the war on drugs in the Philippines, delving into the interplay of images and sound to narrate stories of state-sponsored violence. Through a careful blend of sound bites, text, and visuals, this piece presents intimate interviews with victims and witnesses while capturing the locations where these harrowing events occurred.

The project seeks to answer two pivotal questions: "How can one narrate stories of violence without reproducing the graphic visuals used in the ruthless campaign against the poor?" and "How can a site be circumscribed through images and sound?" To answer these questions, I turned to victims and witnesses of state-sponsored violence in the Philippines.

The title seeks to explore the spaces that emerge when state-sponsored violence occurs in the largest Catholic countries in Asia. Its ethos comes from the idea that some must die for others to live. In this case, the term 'dead' encompasses spaces where people are assumed to eventually die (i.e., urban poor communities) as well as those killed by the campaign against the war on drugs, while 'hymns' refers to the messages conveyed by the victims and witnesses of these abuses.

Film short abstract:

August 4, 2020: Explosion in Beirut. The combination of these words is not surprising. And yet this explosion is like no other. Through testimonies, images and sounds collected from residents who have lived through this event, the film reveals the explosion as an intimate and inner experience.

Film long abstract:

Inhabiting Beirut is a film that explores the impact of the Beirut port explosion of the 4th of August 2020, in terms of inner experiences. Produced in the days and months that followed the event, it makes room for a plurality of voices, in order to account the process of fragmentation induced by violence. In doing so, the aim is to make space to the multiplicity of experiences of the event by hearing testimonies from different social and cultural background in the city and in all the languages that are spoken there (English, French, Arabic).

Alongside the sound recordings of witnesses and victims of the explosion, it is also based on a collection of images collected from cinema professionals using a collaborative method which aims to question the very status of images in the face of disasters.

It is also accompanied by a soundtrack that was designed by a sound engineer who was also victim of the blast, as way of working on the idea of an audio-testimonial.

The diversity and the variety of people and medias mobilized in the film indicates the impossibility of reducing the event to one component or another and questions the idea of a privileged perspective on it.