Original title: Elegy of a city
International title: Elegy of a city
Author: Irene Bartolomé

Synopsis: Elegy of a city is a sensorial portrait of the city of Beirut through the eyes of a fictional female character that travels to the city in current times. She is a visitor to Beirut; she walks, she observes, she listens. Although we never see her, we are her eyes and ears, and we experience the city through her. Before her, Romans, Ottomans, French, earthquakes, civil wars, pandemics and economic crises walked the same alleys. The subsequent past events of violence that took place in Beirut have been absorbed in the setting. Here, the traces of the past, the ruins, cohabit with the spaces of the present, the everyday life.

While seized by the sounds of the city, the character receives voice messages from family and friends that bring out her recent tragedy. Suddenly, the buildings’ broken windows, bullet holes or fallen roofs of Beirut will become a reflection of human wounds, a mirror of the character’s scars. The city landscape will embody the character. In its essence, this film explores an analogy between body and building to reflect on the relationship between cities and individuals when life is perennially disrupted and destruction will come again. Elegy of a city is a chronicle of mortality and survival of the city of Beirut.

Author’s note: This film documents an encounter between a person and a city using fiction and non-fiction elements. Our first aim is to transmit the experience of a place, the city of Beirut. Then, by exploring the connectedness of the people with their surroundings, our intention is to reflect on how the spaces we inhabit affect us, how the spectral presence of past lives in the cities and how inhabitants approach the idea of continuation and progress when surrounded by ruins.
The key idea in this representation of Beirut is that we relocate human attributes into an inanimate being, a building. We look at the buildings as bodies, complex creatures of memory and scars. In the same way that we can say that a muscle has memory, the body, the house, the stone, the tree stores memory as well. On the other hand, we present Beirut’s past traces as scars. The building’s bullet holes get alive – free from their stillness – when we relate them to body scars. We believe that the history of Beirut’s inhabitants has materialised in its buildings.
The cinematography focuses on how people interact and inhabit the spaces, and searches for past traces and destruction in the urbanistic landscape. The camera doesn’t look at the spaces exoticising them either with an inspecting gaze but contemplating the inhabitants owning the place. It is important to point out that this film does not intend only to capture a place but to look in it. Not too close, not too far, the camera is positioned and framed in order to create the perception that the lens is actually the eye of the character, someone looking. At the same time, we want to give time to the audience to look into the frame and get intimate with it. In other words, this film explores a more contemplative cinema.

Irene Bartolomé: filmmaker born in Barcelona, and currently based in Beirut, Lebanon. She holds a BA in Film Editing from ECAM Film school (Madrid), a Master degree in Creative Documentary from UPF (Barcelona) and a MA in Film and Screen Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. She works professionally as a video editor and has over ten years of working experience in documentary and advertisement production. In 2014, she was awarded a SGAE grant to attend the 2014-2015 Collaborative Studio Program at UnionDocs Documentary Art Center, in New York. She has directed the short film Lunch time (2017) and co-directed with visual artist Tessa Rex, the short film The Williamsburg houses (2015).