Film: It's All in Lebanon
by Wissam Charaf
Lebanon 2011
Documentary, 60 min, Arabic OmeU
Discussant:
Elizabeth Holt (Bard College / EUME Fellow 2015/2016)
Curator: Viola Shafik
This Film Screening and the Discussion is part of the Arabic Film Series "Beyond Spring", organized by Mayadin Al-Tahrir e.V., EUME and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.
Synopsis:
In his film Wissam Charaf traces the recent history and identity of Lebanon through its political campaigns, PR imagery, stars and pop videos. And most importantly, how has Lebanon fared in nation-building – through imagemaking – over the 20 years since the Civil War ended? A must-see for all those involved in politics, advertising, public relations and the media.
Elizabeth Holt received her PhD in Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture, and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2009. She is Assistant Professor of Arabic in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College, a small liberal arts college in the hamlet of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where Holt teaches courses in Arabic language, Arabic literature, world literature and translation, literary theory, and Middle Eastern Studies. Holt serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature, a journal she has edited since 2008. She recently completed a manuscript entitled Novel Material: Speculating in Arabic from Beirut to Cairo, 1870-1907, an historical materialist study of the simultaneous rise of the novel form and finance capital in Arabic in the late nineteenth century.
As a EUME Fellow 2015/2016, Holt is working on a book about Arabic literature in the Cold War, focusing on the CIA-founded and funded Congress for Cultural Freedom's literary journal Ḥiwār (1962-67).