Nadine Labaki & Khaled Mouzanar

Blandine Soulage

Venue

Guimet Museum

Lyon

Born 1974 in Beirut, Lebanon.
Live and work in Lebanon.

Film director Nadine Labaki, composer Khaled Mouzanar and illustrator Jorj A. Mhaya shared a childhood marked by the civil war that ravaged Lebanon, their home country. Their animated film, Le Monde va à la guerre et moi j’en reviens, is based on a song written by Khaled Mouzanar in which he describes all the victims of war that he encountered in his childhood. All of them are walking towards him, like ghostly reminiscences of a long nightmare: he sees them walking towards an ineluctable death, a death of an unbearable memory that he wants to bury forever, but not before warning everyone else of the horror of wars and its tragedies. He is walking in the opposite way, where he finds himself alone with the ghosts of his childhood forever haunting him… The video, shown in a space akin to a bunker, which calls to mind the protagonists’ makeshift shelters, acts like a testimony of the brutality of a war by firsthand witnesses. Portraying characters who display courage, hope and resilience in the face of suffering and pain, the film arouses strong emotional reactions with its articulation of forms of strength.