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“Panopticon” is my first work as a director, and it is very personal, presented in an indefinable way, a mixture of documentary and experimental. It is an unusual method in Lebanese cinema. Wasn’t there a fear of presenting a similar work and not knowing the reaction of the Lebanese viewer?
This film is an essay documentary. The experience was basically an audio documentary, then after consultation and reflection, I wanted to present it with a photo. The idea was developed during filming (30 days over three years). When I started editing, I felt that he was not like me, especially since I am not primarily a director and my job is to design sound in movies. I was saddened not to be impressed with the work he had done. A friend and teacher, Muhammad Suwaid, advised me not to be afraid to go to the documentary article even if it is unfamiliar to the audience and is somewhat extreme. In the end, I wanted to make a movie that looked like me.
When you told us in the documentary about your personal history with parents, there was a kind of contradiction between the sound, the image and even the music, why did you choose the contradiction? You could have gone easier; Personal photos with a personal story, for example. Why was her image public and her history private?
– I don’t consider it a contradiction. My way of thinking about the film was in four layers: the first was when I found out that the film is about my father, and I always said that the film is not about my father, until I was convinced after a while that the film is about him. He respected the mother person who didn’t know he was making the movie. So I didn’t want to show it even with an image that I might disagree with. So he just presented his “story” and left people free to imagine it. The second layer is the idea of sound and image. The whole city is out of control, out of understanding, out of harmony. So the sound and the image came separately all the time (if there is a scene of the bridge from above, the sound is the sound of the bridge from below). That was the idea, that we are in a city out of harmony. This helplessness, sadness and pessimism that we feel is due to the idea that the city is out of place. I didn’t want the sound and the picture to say the same thing. The third layer is music, which is further from what we see or hear (words). The fourth layer is storytelling. The narrative is my relationship with this city, my personal relationship. So when I photograph underground, especially since I grew up underground because of the Lebanese war and the invasion, I imagine the organic relationship with it, because I’m still here, even after the explosion on August 4, I’m still here, already that there is a similar relationship between my illnesses and illnesses in the city.
Why was the film banned in Lebanon, even though you had permission to shoot in military locations? After the movie was shown on Netflix and in almost every home; How ridiculous is the position of regulators today?
In fact, the movie was banned for various reasons. It took a long time to get a permit to shoot in the military, including Burj Al-Murr. Then we took the approval of the offer by the army leadership, but General Security asked two days before the show that the military presence and some sentences be erased, so we refused, of course, because the censorship is a lack of respect to our profession (taking into account that there is nothing in the law that allows prevention, so prevention is illegal). There is an absurdity of censorship because it allows the film to be shown at any international festival outside of Lebanon, while prohibiting it in Lebanon, this paradox is stupid. Now regulators have to ask themselves the question: cinema is everywhere and the planet is a small town, so what is the meaning of censorship? Does it have any meaning in the original?
An experimental and symbolic chamber with military, religious and mystical awe
The film is about the father, we want to know if this film is for you a means of reconciliation with the father, or is it an attempt to “kill the father”, especially since the film does not carry anger, but it does have a heavy legacy.
I asked myself this question a lot. I don’t think the father was killed, because I killed him before, or I tried, or I don’t know! My relationship with my father was beautiful, so it was he who taught me what it means to “kill a father”. But there are definitely things like the military suit that I haven’t forgiven him for wearing. The authority of the father, which is inherited from one generation to the next, and also the authority of religion. I consider the film as a kind of getting rid of parental authority, through the burial of the father (I explained in the film how we bury our dead), and rather it is to bury the idea of the father, with the idea of the military with the idea of authority , with the idea of our relationship with the body and disease. I wanted to bury all this. I couldn’t bury her while he was alive, he died suddenly and we always had discussions about these matters. The strange feeling that I felt after the movie was shown on Netflix is that I am now burying my father. We were planning to make a movie together, but he passed away before we could complete the project. I took out the letters we wrote to each other (we communicated by letters because I wasn’t at home, so he was putting messages on my bed) and I did in this movie what I wanted to do with my father.
A trip to the interior of Beirut
“Our society is not a society of the spectacle, but a society of surveillance … We are not in the stands or on the stage, but inside the wheels of the panoptic machine” (Michel Foucault) … And the film “Panopticon “is not far from this. Rana borrowed the Panopticon and explained it in his film, presenting the cinema as a Foucauldian character, as an anachronistic, modern, materialistic and spiritual approach. Between surveillance and social control, the image of Rana Eid is a very personal audiovisual anthropological perspective, like a Greek myth. Rana Eid based the film on the controversial relationship between her and her father and his military uniform, between her and the city, and between him and Beirut, the war and the military. She took away the fears of her past and the weight of patriarchal tradition, and did not punish herself, her father, or her city, but instead sighted and replaced the Foucauldian watchtowers, or the eyes of the gazing giant. in Greek mythology, with his camera and voice recorder. The camera planted and detected the impact of power, not the power of power.
My Mashhad “Banobetik”
“Panopticon” is Rana Eid’s message to her father, a daughter’s letter to her late military father. Through these audio messages, we delve into modern Beirut, in an in-depth analysis of Beirut’s secret dimension. Eid tells his story with his father and tries to reconcile himself with Lebanon’s recent past, with the reality of a country afflicted by schizophrenia and full of contradictions. For a country that forgets itself due to many conflicts and does not want to deal with its past. “Panopticon” is where Rana’s voice meets the sights of the city, its iconic and secret landmarks, and we even dive with her underwater. An audiovisual symphony with Rana’s voice speaking about his father and his dreams in a poetic way. Rana was the girl who hid in the sound, she was the one who hid below to escape from above. She is the one who came out of the refuge in a country that has not yet come out of hiding. She is neither a director, nor a sound designer, nor a screenwriter, she is simply a daughter.
Experimental and symbolic is a camera of Frog, with military, religious and mystical amazement, which he uses in search of a visual structure to discuss memory. Sometimes the image slows down in an attempt to stop time. There is a balanced contrast in the film, the surface and the underground, the truth and the secret. We listen to memory, the past, and dreams, and we see reality and the present. The letter to his father is simple and unflattering, sweet and warm, lucid and without personal injury. Fearless frog, he has the courage to show what others are hiding and says what one could avoid saying to oneself. It is a game of life and the complexity of moments. Rana’s movie is like a common human connection that binds us together, devastation combined with bitterness from a harsh recent past. In her film she was swimming on the map of Beirut, she, her father and Beirut … three main characters, devastated and tired, each with a different story. The place here is not an ordinary circumstance, but rather a main character in the film (Alien Offender Prison, Murr Tower, Beau Rivage Hotel). And as we immerse ourselves in the characters, we feel the unshakable laws of attraction.
With the beginning of the film, we realize that we are facing a journey into the depths of a human being through his voice, from now on, each chapter and each image is an attempt to search within the self and the soul humans, hoping to find the burial. The revelation rises, the lines diverge, embrace the main story and fuse it in its surroundings of Beiruti, this place lost between East and West. Frog informs us of the details and sits down to tell his story, as the scenes turn towards us, very slowly. Skillfully avoid the trap of false or exaggerated emotions. The film embodies the story of a complex relationship with great fluidity, striking a rare balance between emotional intensity and intellectual clarity, and between characters overwhelmed by emotion and the gravity of situations. In this film, Rana presents the contracts that unite a suffocating society that still nurtures outdated ideas: bourgeois comfort, fear, denial of change, racism, and rejection or mixing with foreigners. The melodrama created by the unique Rana is based on a balanced coldness that immerses the sensual atmosphere of the cinema with a realistic climate that goes beyond the emotional. Thus, we can immerse ourselves in the story in a harmonious way, avoiding excessive emotional emotion. I wanted to provide accurate explanations of human emotions without adding melodramatic elements. So it seems more believable and realistic, and therein lies the strength of the movie. She portrayed the human race as very contradictory beings, but they are united by many things: the darkness that surrounds them, fear, the need for psychological comfort, tenderness, and death. All this is captured by the viewer with a real, deep, intellectual, poetic, metaphorical camera and, above all, humanity, even excessively human.
* “Panopticon” on Netflix
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