Ali Cherri

In 1982, Wim Wenders asked 16 of his fellow directors to speak on the future of cinema, resulting in the film Room 666. Now, 40 years later, in Cannes, director Lubna Playoust asks Wim Wenders himself and a new generation of filmmakers (James Gray, Rebecca Zlotowski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Nadav Lapid, Asghar Farhadi, Alice Rohrwacher and more) the same question: “is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”

Halil spends his nights in a watchtower waiting for an enemy that doesn’t arrive, until suddenly strange lights appear on the horizon. Ali Cherri creates a universe in which a suspended and void time opens the door to ghostly presences from a past made of war. Shot with an extreme and detailed precision of vision and sound, The Watchman is an urgent film that deconstructs the myth of duty, laying bare the absurdity of the omnipresent war rhetoric.

Merowe Dam in North Sudan. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to erect a mysterious construction made of mud. Despite a disturbing wound in his lower back that seems to be eating away at his skin, he continues his labor day after day. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his mud creation starts slowly to take a life of its own.

Nabil returns to Beirut with the ashes of his father who died abroad. He tries to overcome his bereavement while his family insists on respecting rites and customs by burying a non-existent corpse.

It all happened on a dark night. The Man was tired of being a stranger, tired of being insulted by others simply because he speaks Arabic to a wife who speaks French with their beloved mixed race son. He looked at the sky and shouted. But that night, far in the cosmos, a voice answered.

In Gazing at the Catastrophe, Ali Cherri reflects on how suffering has become increasingly integrated into his daily life. Witnessing of atrocities, Cherri argues, seems to be an inevitable condition of modernity. The knowledge of war gained by those who have not experienced it firsthand is informed exclusively by mediated images found on the internet or in the media.

During the July War of 2006, as warships evacuated foreigners and dual-nationality Lebanese, the “State of Israel” intercepted the broadcast of The Voice of the People radio station to deliver an audio message to Lebanese citizens. Israel interrupts the broadcast of "Sawt Al-Sha'eb," as Fairuz finishes performing Talal Haidar's poem "Wahdun" (They Alone) and starts singing another verse in which she declares her eternal love for Lebanon. Meanwhile, ships are evacuating those fleeing the flames of war—three enormous contradictions. Coincidence can carry so much meaning.

A French soldier, gently bent at the waist, a rifle lodged in his mouth. The rifle fires. Whether he dies or dreams is left unresolved, the decision deferred to the viewer.

In the Sharjah desert, Sultan Zeib Khan makes the rounds of the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis where the foundations of the nation are kept. Amid the tombs, the vastness of the desert is palpable. Time plays no role in the ritual that Zeib Khan has performed daily for the past 20 years.

Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Somniculus (the Latin word for “light sleep”) articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them. Artefacts from museums of ethnography, archaeology and natural sciences are all presented in their existing cultural context as the surviving objects of human interest.

Earth-shattering events are relatively par for the course in Lebanon, with war, political upheaval and a number of social revolts. While the Lebanese focus on surface level events that could rock the nation, few realize that below the ground we walk on, an actual shattering of the earth is mounting. Lebanon stands on several major fault lines, which are cracks in the earth's crust. The film investigates the geological situation in Lebanon, trying to look for the traces of the imminent disaster.

Ali Cherri’s Of Men and Gods and Mud follows a group of brickmakers as they produce building materials from mud at a factory in northern Sudan. The factory is located near the massive Merowe Dam, which is one of the largest hydroelectric projects in Africa. Although it brought much-needed electricity to the region, its construction devastated ecosystems and displaced more than 50,000 people, leading to civil unrest. Cherri’s video is narrated with excerpts from his Book of Mud, read in English and Arabic.

In a cyclical structure from dark to light, this film is a reflection on growing up in Beirut during the civil war years and adapting to the "post war" life: accepting the body that is in ruin, and learning to live in the city that is always already in ruin.

Between dreamscapes and reality, this video is a journey in three chapters, on the backdrop of the uprising in the Arab world. A Rise, a Decline, and a Fall that would create a tabula rasa and a new start. "Sometimes dreams have to hurt before they become a reality"