SYNOPSIS
Night is Day is a kind of logbook, a chronology that begins a few days before the uprising in Lebanon in October 2019, takes shape with it, accompanies it, runs out of steam with the pandemic, tries to escape to the mountains, comes up against loss, witnessing it to the end, intimately and collectively at the same time.
＊This screening includes a 15-minute intermission.
REVIEW
Director Ghassan Salhab has created an epic of resistance chronicling the uprising in Lebanon from 2019 to 2023. In Beirut, fall 2019, the city resonates with revolutionary jubilation as people transform their frustrations into action. Soon after, the city is locked down due to the pandemic, and the Beirut harbor explodes. Shortly following, Israel sends troops into Gaza. Salhab edited dozens of hours of cell phone footage to create a film that defies the passage of time. Initially posted on the director's Instagram without intent for a film, the accumulated footage evolved into a chronicle, ultimately becoming a film. The first half of the film, documenting the civil resistance movement, is both similar and different, expressing the energy of an endlessly repeating movement. The steady rhythm of the fighters' chants seems to reiterate their will. As people begin to wear masks and streets empty, time flows anew. The beauty of Night is Day lies in its poetic shift from a collective epic about the uprising to a personal narrative of a man continuing to make films despite the helplessness created by the lockdown. From this point, attention shifts to text rather than struggle. Like the angry words exchanged with his Palestinian friend, Ghassan Salhab traverses the dissipation and end of resistance, from collective hope to suffering, in a 361-minute marathon.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
The idea for the film came to me suddenly. I was in Senegal working on another project. I was going through the videos stored on my phone, trying to free up some space, when I started watching the videos of the Lebanese uprising for the first time. I finally had enough perspective. It was June 2023. I started saving all the videos on a hard drive, arranging them in chronological order. October, November, December, January... I didn't know when I'd stop.
