Film Screenings / Programs / Series
GHASSAN SALHAB: UNTITLED, THEN WITH
December 16 – December 17
Beirut-based director Ghassan Salhab’s work – which takes the form of both essayistic films and fictions – undertakes the act of witnessing absence. Whether reckoning with the desolation wrought by Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2024 in the recent NO TITLE (2025) or with Israel’s earlier 2006 bombardment in (POSTHUMOUS), Salhab’s essay-films ask, “But how are the dead to witness their own death? And how am I to see the image of my own death as I die?” Faced with a torrent of images, Salhab’s camera is often trained on the landscape, or on distance itself. This program threads the linkages between these two films, made nearly twenty years apart, as a way of thinking about both the interim and the present.
The second night of programming features Salhab’s fictional film THE VALLEY (2014), which measures distance in a man who has lost his language, and hence his knowledge of himself. In a liminal space where he is recovering or perhaps being held hostage after surviving a car accident, amnesiac anonymity accompanies a descent into war and isolation.
These two screenings coincide with A Perfect Vacuum Press’s publication of “Untitled, Then With”, which features Salhab in conversation with anthropologist Irina Podgorny and philosopher Julien Pieron.
Upcoming Screenings
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(POSTHUMOUS) + NO TITLE
December 16 at 7:00 PM
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Ghassan Salhab
THE VALLEY / AL-WADI
December 17 at 7:00 PM
