Ode to Loneliness
Qumra Projects
/ Short Documentary / Lebanon, Qatar / 2020
Rated: This film has not been rated.
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Synopsis
A woman lives alone in a cubical hotel room with a view to the city. She films herself, the city, and her dreams for a month.
Dreaming of the city, she gets lost in intricate geometries. Sharp edges of buildings etch her skin silently, chiselling the limits of her consciousness, altering her perception of distance and scale, redefining intimacy and sensuality. Rhythms, towers, workers, sunsets, sunrises, night-time and dream-time alternate and repeat and get lost one in another endlessly. Slowly, she becomes an image of her former self. Slowly she grows older. She once wanted something, but she forgot what it was. Trapped in time, she waits and watches life pass by below her feet, lest some of it visits her abode. Housed in aloneness, in the perimeter of a cube, the architects build memories that only boredom could destroy.
The city enters the house in all its details. From macro to micro, a constant flow of adaptation has to happen. The limit between the house and the city, the city and the body, the body and the dream, the dream and her, gets blurred. Nothing is real, yet all is artificial. From her window, from her house with a view, with some clothes, some objects, a routine, and a deep desire to feel, she escapes. The night comes, silently a door opens, and she walks away. The house is a body that flies.
About the Director
Born in Beirut in 1983, Rawane Nassif is a Lebanese-Canadian filmmaker and anthropologist. She works in research and films often addressing subjects such as space, identities, displacement and memory. She collaborated on several documentaries in Lebanon, wrote a book on the politics of memory in the reconstruction of downtown Beirut, worked with immigrants and indigenous people in Canada, conducted visual research on nomadic traditions in Kyrgyzstan, taught anthropological courses in Tajikistan, wrote children’s books based on collected oral histories in Honduras and worked as a senior researcher on art films commissioned by the National Museum of Qatar and produced by the Doha Film Institute. Her latest short 'Turtles are Always Home' screened at the Berlinale and TIFF and won international awards including the best new vision short at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the best experimental at the New Orleans Film Festival.