Ma nuit à Beyrouth

There is a voice – Aida’s – telling a story: the story of a man, a Lebanese dancer living in France, who comes to Beirut to visit his parents. He needs to renew his passport.

The voice – Aida’s – describes the man waiting in a queue; the man who dances – that is his name – and then that of a crowd, standing, packed tightly together, in the night, shoulder to shoulder, for several nights, in the dark, behind a wall topped with barbed wire, in front of a government building in the centre of Beirut.
Behind the wall, everyone waits for their ticket – a magic ticket that will grant them the right to pass beyond the wall and into the compound that delivers the ‘open sesame’, the passport, the guarantee of ‘one foot in, one foot out’, for ‘In Lebanon, it’s a matter of survival; you never know what might happen next’, says the man who dances.

And an encounter takes place. For the man’s story acts as a counterpoint, rekindling Aida’s memory; memories surface, a first journey to Lebanon. She constructs her own narrative. She reclaims her history. She takes it in gently: a dreamt-of Orient, a family trip, a landscape of war without the war, images of a country destroyed by 15 years of civil war.
“The shock of the scars of war.”
She articulates it clumsily, through a few words in Lebanese.


A sideways portrait of a Lebanon grappling with the collapse of a failed state, in the throes of an unprecedented economic, financial and institutional crisis, where the end of the year 2