An interview with Jean-Luc Godard around the time of his film Notre Musique.

It's autumn. A man and a woman are about to leave a restaurant situated in the heart of the Lebanese mountains. They are suprised by fighter planes screaming past at low altitude. In the distance, war seems to be breaking out once more. Losing sight of the woman, the man starts looking for her. He finds her on the other side of the mountain. Together they sink deeper into nature, which becomes increasingly spectral, just like the slender thread that ties them to each other.

It's autumn. A man and a woman are about to leave a restaurant situated in the heart of the Lebanese mountains. They are suprised by fighter planes screaming past at low altitude. In the distance, war seems to be breaking out once more. Losing sight of the woman, the man starts looking for her. He finds her on the other side of the mountain. Together they sink deeper into nature, which becomes increasingly spectral, just like the slender thread that ties them to each other.

Night falls over Beirut. Fadi, a forty year old, packs his luggage and sets out to the airport with his friend driving him. He is supposed to leave for a month, but instead of going up the plane, he heads to the arrivals section and rents a car. He takes the highway heading North then continues on a mountainous route. Far from anyone, on a deserted highway, a deviation forces him to quit the main road. A distinct sound coming from far is heard; the sound of a car honk. Fadi gets closer and closer to the sound and sees a wrecked car crashed in a tree alongside the road. A couple lay still inside.

Each morning Beirut awakens to a new murder seemingly committed by a serial killer, with victims found emptied of their blood. At the same time a doctor, Khalil, begins to experience strange symptoms that destabilise him and transform his life. A connection slowly emerges that seems to link Khalil to these victims. Salhab’s body of films have come to narrate the state of Lebanon – and Beirut in particular – during and after the civil war, and this film is no exception.

Each morning Beirut awakens to a new murder seemingly committed by a serial killer, with victims found emptied of their blood. At the same time a doctor, Khalil, begins to experience strange symptoms that destabilise him and transform his life. A connection slowly emerges that seems to link Khalil to these victims. Salhab’s body of films have come to narrate the state of Lebanon – and Beirut in particular – during and after the civil war, and this film is no exception.

In Ghassan Salhab’s recent short filmic poems and political documentaries, he deliberately uses minimal images to make eloquent expressions of the desire for a new reality. As Salhab puts it: “The uprising in Lebanon was seriously starting to run out of steam; the first lockdown abruptly interrupted it, temporarily, we think. Now, as Bernard Noël Wrote, we must raise our fists and fight the memory.”

After surviving a car crash in the middle of Lebanon's isolated Beqaa Valley, an amnesiac man finds himself held hostage on a local farm that doubles as an illegal drug-production facility.

Late in the 1980s it seems like the Lebanese conflict will never end. Khalil returns to Beirut after many years. Ten years earlier, during a battle, he took advantage of the confusion and pretended he was dead.

What will you do, God, when I die? (R.M. Rilke)