64 mins, B&W, 16 mm
Lebanese filmmaker Christian Ghazi considered his striking and ambitious experimental fiction One Hundred Faces for a Single Day to be his ‘personal manifesto’. Through disjointed plots and overlapping storylines he delivers a searing critique of the Lebanese bourgeoisie in their apathy and hypocrisy, at the same time as celebrating the militant masses for their sacrifices. Disparities and dissonances are rendered, shard-like, to convey frictions between people on intersecting levels of class, nationality, gender. The film’s bold and layered sound design is as jagged as its images – something Ghazi claimed was to prevent the viewer from relaxing while viewing. Radio crackles throughout, complicating the idea of news, received information and its relationship to action. Silence too makes an appearance, sharpening the viewer’s focus to the movement of the fida’i tracked from a birds-eye-view as they navigate a rocky terrain. A paean, if not an exhortation, for resistance through direct action – as the resolute voice over, quoting Darwish’s “Roses and the Dictionary” intones: I refuse the roses as defined in a dictionary, or cited in a collection of poems. Roses grow on the arms of a peasant and in the fist of a worker. Roses grow from the wound of a fighter and on a rock front.
One Hundred Faces for a Single Day is available in Arabic with English subtitles.
Directed By: Christian Ghazi
