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All is Well on the Border

Akram Zaatari

1997 00:44:53 LebanonArabicColorMono4:3BetacamSP video

Description

One of Zaatari’s earliest experiments in documentary video, All Is Well on the Border emerged from the filmmaker’s desire to understand Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon following the 1982 Lebanon War. The video presents a series of testimonies by Lebanese citizens who were detained during the occupation, each presenting an image of resistance that falls outside the dominant narrative of liberation and solidarity promoted by the Lebanese left. At the same time, by actively resisting the tendency in political documentary filmmaking to give a voice to those who do not have one, Zaatari adopts a form of self-critique similar to the one used by Godard and Miéville twenty years earlier in Here and Elsewhere.

About Akram Zaatari

Akram Zaatari is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. He has been exploring Lebanon's postwar condition through collecting testimonies and various documents, notably on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television, and the logic of Resistance in the context of the current geographical division of the Middle East.

Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), he based his recent work on collecting, studying, and archiving a particular collection on the Middle East, notably studying the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani (1928-) as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices.

In addition to his work as an artist, Zaatari is also the curator of the Radical Closure box set, which includes his work In This House.

Grand winner of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil.

Represented in the Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.