Sea and Its Waves (dir. Liana Kassir, Renaud Pachot, 2023, 121 min.)

A passionate ode to Beirut – that troubled but still mesmerising city – this story of a night spent on the docks, where brother and sister Mansour and Najwa wait anxiously for a boat to take them away to Norway, is like a film poem composed out of darkness. Local characters loom out of the night, each one with a story that reveals another aspect of this wounded culture, but merging into a narrative that is both observational and surreal, heightened by unexpected musical flourishes, pools of light that suddenly illuminate the city’s skyscrapers and people whose woes are never fully explained. In their debut drama, Liana and Renaud have reached for a new cinematic language to illuminate the city’s profound trauma.

The film will be presented by curator Marija Nemčenko