Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

I left Lebanon in 2006. For the past 10 years I lived in 7 countries, 10 cities, and 21 homes. I slept in 21 beds, cooked in 21 kitchens, cleaned 21 bathrooms, wrote on 21 desks and locked 21 doors behind me. I packed all of my life into two suitcases and a backpack. The rest stayed behind. Somebody somewhere uses my bed, somebody somewhere has my shoes, somebody somewhere maybe remembers me in those fragmented traces of mine. I was there. But now I am here. In Qatar. In a fake Venice with colorful houses. Houses have memories too. They hide them under their windowsills, tuck them in layers of paint and sometimes whisper them to birds passing by. I wonder whose memories will these houses keep. I live here but I am unable to leave a trace. I try to attach myself to the walls, dirty them, mark them… but I fail. They are constantly cleaned, watched and protected. I caress them instead. And I film them, lest I forget. Home is where the heart is, they say. I disagree. My heart is everywhere. It left with the music. Like a turtle, I am always home.

Rawane Nassif is a Lebanese/Canadian filmmaker and anthropologist. She works in research and films often addressing subjects such as space, traditions, identities, displacement and memory. Rawane has directed social documentaries and wrote a book on the politics of memory in Lebanon, worked with immigrants and indigenous people in Canada, conducted visual research on nomadic traditions in Kyrgyzstan, taught anthropological courses in Tajikistan, wrote children’s books based on oral histories in Honduras and worked as a film researcher with the Doha Film Institute and the National Museum of Qatar. Her short film, “ Turtles are Always Home ” screened at numerous film festivals including the Berlinale, AFI Docs, Toronto, Camden, and RIDM. She is currently completing a mentorship with the “ Masters in Experimental Cinema, Creative Documentaries, and Video Creation ” Program at the Transforming Arts Institute in Madrid.