Featuring Hind Rostom

2005 | Video, DVcam | 24 minutes

A TV flickers with the light of a thousand images on a humid summer night in Beirut. The sounds of a talk show, the music of an Egyptian film, and a star’s voice travel through the darkness as a sleepless observer awaits dawn. 
A woman spends her nights in the living room in the company of a VCR and an irregular signal but the television soon acquires a life of its own, spilling over reality until it contaminates every place and minute.
The soundtrack designed for Featuring Hind Rostom is entirely sourced from “The Lebanese Civil War Archive” at “Voice of the People” radio station, and private collections. The coupling of intimate images of a stranger’s waking hours with the sounds of the civil war creates a paradoxical yet strangely familiar and soothing setting that almost every Lebanese household has known over the last few decades. The sound of vigilance. The melodies of distraction. The noise of fear.