This experimental video reimagines Zahraa Salman’s essay War: A Memory Passed Down from Generation to Generation as a visual meditation on how civil war outlives its battlefield, transmitted through language, gesture, and everyday life. The film unfolds across five acts, each exploring a different temporal and emotional layer of Lebanon’s post-war psyche.
Through an assemblage of found footage, archival fragments, home videos, broadcast recordings, and contemporary observational shots, the work reconstructs the continuity of violence as an inherited memory. The archival image becomes both a mirror and a virus a carrier of unresolved trauma, reactivated within the film’s textures and silences.
Each act reuses archival material not as historical documentation but as living residue photographs flickering into motion, distorted political speeches, family tapes dissolving into static, schoolyard recordings of recited hymns, all intertwined with a female voice that reflects on violence she never witnessed but nonetheless inhabits.
The video uses visual decay, superimposition, and slow temporal shifts to evoke how symbolic and sectarian violence infiltrate education, media, and everyday language. Sound plays a central role: distant explosions merge with present-day urban noise, children’s voices blend with chants and prayers, and silence becomes a recurring motif of repression and remembrance.
In this work, the archive is not a place it is an illness of continuity, a condition of collective consciousness. The film does not seek closure; instead, it exposes the porous borders between past and present, where peace feels like an echo of war.
Based on the text by Zahraa Salman: War: A Memory Passed Down from Generation to Generation
