“A bricolage of scars, traces of repair, iconic meditations on the other side of war.

In 1981 Volker Schlöndorff was filming Circle of Deceipt (Die Fälschung) in Beirut with the ongoing civil war (1975-90) as a backdrop, and real fighters playing themselves.

This news, which I discovered in Etel Adnan’s story An American Malady, brought Etel and I together to develop the feature script Benjamin’s briefcase, a reference to what was lost when Walter Benjamin’s body was found. Christmas, 2004, I arrived in Beirut and filmed for two weeks. The idea of a feature transformed in to a personal journey. This is the first two chapters in the series p.s. Beirut, the story of how I found Benjamin’s briefcase.”

Michael H Shamberg