Un cœur perdu et autres rêves de Beyrouth

We hear voices. They speak of dreams. These are dreams full of war and death, dreams of desperation and rage, but also dreams that blur the border between the living and the dead. In one of them, a father dreams about his dead son. The father asks where to find him. The son answers: “I’m in the rocks where I submerged myself. I’m in the hearts of Fátima, Mariam and Katia. I am under your feet. I am everywhere”. That “I am everywhere” is, to a certain extent, the miracle of the film. There are faceless voices and voiceless faces. There are faces in the city’s walls, on posters. There are women and men, of all ages, who walk, dance, smoke, make juice, stare into the distance, come and go. They appear and disappear in the film, fleetingly. We slide from one to another, without realising, but each woman and each man seems briefly essential to us. In all of these people, men and women, in every corner of Beirut, in any gesture, this is what the father is really seeking in his dream, the thing which is not his son but, to a certain extent, is also him. Life and the city overflow into the film or rather more, the film is able to let itself overflow through the city, in little over half an hour, it invents a way of making us sense the infinite and precious aspect of their lives and their dreams.

Pablo García Canga