26/09/2005

Last night, the Namur Festival of Francophone Film presented a project which is close to its heart. A Perfect day was selected last year at the first Co-production Forum organised by the Festival. Crowned this year at the Locarno Festival Film with the Fipresci Prize, this co-production between France (Mille et une productions) and Lebanon (Abbout Productions) makes us aware of the need for European aid to films from the South. Aided by the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Southern Fund, and the Hubert Bals Fund, the second feature by Joana Hadjithomas and by Khalil Joreige is a film of great simplicity, luminous and modest.

Present for the screening of the film, Khalil Joreige explained the genesis of his project, inspired by his uncle, "one of the 17 000 disappeared during the war. One morning they came for him and we never saw him again." The absence of the father from the family gnaws away at the two characters in this film, and it asks the question "How to survive in Beirut today?". After a fiction film (Autour de la maison rose, 1999) and documentaries (Khiam, 2000 - Le film perdu, 2003), the directors turn their attentions to an errant son and his mother in present day Beirut, both condemned to carry the burden of this absence.

Claudia haunts the apartment, incapable of mourning her husband, who disappeared fifteen years earlier and transfers to her son a drowning form of anguish. She lives in a frozen present, on the edge of madness. As for Malek, he attempts to escape his mother to chase after his girlfriend to whom he can offer no future. He suffers from narcolepsy and can fall asleep at any moment, bearing a mutism that makes him almost phantom-like. Laid back, he comes and goes in a modern town made up of kilometres of traffic jams and billboards, TV shows, mobile phones and techno parties. With an almost minimalist style, closer to documentary, keeping a distance from their characters, Hadjithomas and Joreige follow them throughout the day, attentive to the tiniest details of daily life, revealed in harmless gestures and every little silence, things which haunt them. In the end they reveal this place, invisible to the naked eye, this weight of the past which creates its own way of living in that world, a subjectivity.

The film is sold internationally by Celluloïd Dreams.

(Translated from French)