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.