Christian Ghazi
Directing
Biography
A Lebanese director and activist, who was born in Antakya, Turkey in 1938 to a Lebanese father and a French mother. He began his career in the fifties and sixties, when he directed Freedom Fighters (1967). During the Lebanese civil war, he wanted to portray the atrocities of the war through his documentaries, but some militia burned the negative of all his films, leaving him only Hundred Faces for a Single Day (1970). He took part in 21 commando operations. He married stage actress Madonna Ghazi, who died in a tragic car accident. He was honored in 2009 by the initiative Club for All People. In 2013, he passed away at age 75.
Known For
Rejecting all propagandistic or narrative convention, Ghazi combined documentary and abstract sequences with a series of discontinuous plot lines to organize a stinging attack on the bourgeois decadence of Beirut's political milieu.
Hundred Faces for a Single Day
A hypnotic play going inside the mind of a mental astronomer
A Play Entitled Sehnsucht
In 1970, Christian Ghazi and Noureddine Chatti met with a number of Arab political figures, especially Palestinians residing in Lebanon, resulting in this piece of armed (alternative or third) cinema that captures a crucial cross-section of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon in 1970. The film features footage of Ghassan Kanafani, Sadiq Jalal El-Azm, Nabil Shaath and other personalities who share their vision of the Palestinian revolution, tracing its history back to the early 20th century. These testimonies describe the numerous strikes and popular protests that took place in Palestine under the Ottoman occupation, followed by the British colonization and the settlement of the Jewish state in 1948. They enumerate the objectives of the struggle, emphasising the necessity for a free and democratic Palestine, defended through armed or non-armed struggle by all its citizens, men and women of various affiliations.
Resistance, Why?
After an interruption of thirty years. Christian Ghazi resumes his cinematographic work with the documentary "Coffin of the Memory". The film mixes newly shot interviews with archive images. In the interviews it sheds light on two basic issues, solitude and economic situation. Through images and simple daily situations, Christian Ghazi draws a portrait of the Lebanese society, a society drowning in its contradictions and its search for an empty individualism and the superficiality of daily consumption, that of production, ideas, time and space.