village off-frame: on images and their failure

Official Selection at Écrans du Réel, Doc Screens Festival, Beirut (September 2026)

essay film, 2026, 19', 2k, stereo, color
Arabic / English subtitles

VILLAGE OFF-FRAME is an essay film built around a series of personal archival photographs taken by the artist in his home village in South Lebanon between 2008 and 2018. After leaving the village and being unable to return due to war and exile, these images transform into the sole traces of a space that can no longer be physically reached.
Rather than functioning as stable documents, the photographs reveal their own material weaknesses, fractures, and inability to fully preserve what they depict. Through an exploration of memory, distance, and the mechanics of perception, the work examines the critical gap between image and place, sign and real. The film approaches the image’s ontological failure as the condition through which another relationship to the image emerges.