visuals
we interrupt this program




‘We interrupt this program’
2020
Moving image
15 minutes 48 seconds


'We interrupt this program' appropriates archival material like documentary films, reportage, TV broadcast clips, feature films, interview audio, music, and music videos. The complete film is made of an anthology of eight stand-alone video works.

My parents shared personal anecdotes and political histories from the ‘70s and 80s that felt surreal. They spoke candidly about the Lebanese civil war, about sending love letters on Israeli postcards during the first Intifada, about my mother crossing the border to buy an American wedding dress, about a world-famous Lebanese beauty queen who eloped with a PLO operative involved in the Munich massacre, about sex, espionage, and prison. In its attempts to make sense of these stories, the work is transformed into quasi-fiction. While it concerns larger regional politics, it does not embody an ontological, political argument but instead constructs a personal history of Arabhood through its complications and conflicts. Each film leans into entropy, uncovering and inventing sexy mythologies around wartime, beauty queens, and imperialism.