Movies: Akram Zaatari

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This is a recording of a silent moment, in which 2 men prepare themselves for a military action. While the older one leaves in the end, weapon to his shoulder, the younger one decides to stay. In this video, Zaatari works with a former member of the ...

‘Objects of War’ is a series of testimonials on the Lebanese war. Each person chooses an object, ordinary or unusual, which serves as a starting point for his / her story. These testimonials while helping to create a collective memory, also show the ...

It is a critique of television's promotion of political figures. A candidate running for presidency talks about his political agenda and addresses the public with a general and casual speech on issues such as resistance, cultural heritage, and educat...

In a city post-apocalypse, young men communicate only through smart devices. They make home out of urban debris. They can’t speak to each other, but are still able to dream....

This work deals with the discovery of light and of its power to reconstruct images. Through a boy who discovers the possibilities of framing and manipulating light with a mirror, the idea of making images appears in the daily life of the children liv...

"A 4 channel video installation based on youtube material made by individuals filming themselves in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Yemen, and Libya."...

On Photography, People and Modern Times is a two-channel video installation that tracks photographic records that Akram Zaatari researched and collected for the Arab Image Foundation between 1998 and 2000. It is a meditation on the two lives of photo...

The Script is born out of the artist’s research into online content connected with the Arab world. Exploring YouTube using relatively neutral search terms such as ‘father and son’, Zaatari discovered multiple videos depicting fathers praying. Despite...

TEACH ME is an interpretation of iconic images. This short essay is built on the ascription of a new meaning to TV news footage. The mingling of news soundtracks with dialogues from old Egyptian films enriches the meaning of the images....

Unravels a dual journey – extroverted in place, introverted in memory. Beginning with a photograph taken in the 1950s by historian Jibrail Jabbour the film journeys further into Jabbour’s photographic archives, then into the filmmaker’s personal phot...

GIFT discusses the idea of public space : on a public beach, right across from a residential block, a young boy begs the filmmaker to let him join soccer players in order to appear on television. The faces of the passers-by staring at the camera and ...

A journalist and a photographer drift on their way between Beirut and Baalbeck. Their journey is repeated three times in three different ways to evoke current issues and confusion in Lebanon’s present state....

A late night online chat between two men who haven't met since the turn of the millennium leads to their reunion after ten years of separation. The film navigates against time with an unsettling use of communication, recording technologies and tempor...

Lebanese artist-filmmaker Zaatari conducts both an investigation and a stirring tribute to an act of resistance (or forbearance) that marked his childhood memories: the refusal of an Israeli pilot to bomb a boys' high school in south Lebanon in 1982....

A reflection on film and television, this video travels the globe mixing footage of real-life war and reel entertainment. COUNTDOWN explores our sense of real-time transmission and movement through space as we experience them in televised images of b...

Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this film is a reflection on photography and its people. It looks at the position of the individual within the context of war and displacement, as well as how photographs have become the ...

Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem explores the work of photographer Hashem el Madani, who has run a commercial photography studio in southern Lebanon for the last five decades. After spending years photographing people in front of their shops, in public...

An eleven-minute film by Akram Zaatari from 1995. Memories and images of childhood are reflected both on the screen and in the small mirror that a young boy plays with. Filmmaker and video artist Akram Zaatari was born in Saida, Lebanon in 1966 and ...

In 1998, Akram Zaatari interviewed Egyptian photographer Van Leo in Cairo. In 2001 he made the video Her + Him Van Leo and based it on the story of a woman who once entered Studio Van Leo and asked the artist to take pictures of her naked. At the tim...