Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Rumor of the World, 2014. Video installation, 13 screens, 37 HD films variable lengths. Installation view, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: I Must First Apologize…, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2016. Photo: Peter Harris.
Harvard Film Archive Film Series: A Perfect Day (Yawmon akhar)
February 12, 2016
The Harvard Film Archive (HFA) is pleased to present Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige - Lost Films and Mediations, a retrospective of the films of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige to coincide with their List Center exhibition I Must First Apologize…. Screening takes place at the Harvard Film Archive.
A Perfect Day (Yawmon akhar), 2005.
Lebanon/France/Germany
35mm, color, 88 min.
Arabic with English subtitles
.
Years after the war and the disappearance of the man who was their husband and father, a woman waits obsessively for his return while her grown son mourns a lost love. On the day the two seek to have the missing man declared dead, life presents possible ways forward—but grief, guilt and easy distractions seem to bar the way. Hadjithomas and Joreige inserted their fiction into the reality that inspired it by shooting documentary-style in public places around Beirut. The result is a portrait of postwar youth caught between nostalgia for a mythic past and anxiety for the future.