Between fantasy and reality, Alex enters the world of her mother’s tumultuous, passionate adolescence during the Lebanese civil war, unlocking mysteries of a hidden past.

[3] Well-known for their experimental techniques, the filmmakers duo used Hadjithomas’s own journal and tapes between 1982 and 1988 and Joreige’s photographs of the Lebanese civil war to mix imagination and reality.

[4] Re-writing contemporary history and questioning the role of memory in the fabrication of images is a recurrent theme in Hadjithomas and Joreige’s artistic and cinematographic work.

The pair has shown particular interests in the traces of the invisible and the absent, histories kept secret and the disappearances during the Lebanese Civil War which is present in films like A Perfect Day, in which Malek and his mother decide to declare his father officially dead after his disappearance for 15 years during the civil war, and Je Veux Voir, where Catherine Deneuve, representing herself, faces with the devastation of South Lebanon after military conflicts in 2006.

It’s introspective, affecting, and visually inventive depiction of how memory, good or bad, plays a huge part in shaping us in the present.