“Memory Box”, a youth in Beirut

It was through Facebook that she learned that the opening was taking place. This evening in 2013, Corinne Ejeil goes there and comes across Joana Hadjithomas, her teenage friend she met in Lebanon and whom she has not seen for twenty-five years. This one presents The Lebanese Rocket Society, a documentary and an installation around the space ambitions of the country in the 1960s, imagined, like all his work, with his companion Khalil Joreige.

When Corinne left Lebanon for France, Joana remained in a Beirut torn apart by civil war. From 1982 to 1988, the two teenagers sent each other hundreds of letters, audio cassettes, drawings… “When we found each other, it was as if nothing had changed., says Joana Hadjithomas. Both had kept everything from these archives. »

The two friends exchange them, and the artist-filmmaker then finds all of this testimony cobbled together thirty years earlier: chronicles of what she was going through then, lists of what she ate, curves to show the state of her daily morale, songs, stories recorded on tape with interruptions due to bombings or alerts, tragic disappointments, stories of hopes, annoyances, transport… “I even speak of Khalil, whom I had just met. I couldn’t bear it: I nicknamed it “The Terror”! »

A deluge of memories

The resurgence of these documents intrigues their daughter, a teenager at the time. But the couple refuses that she read them in detail: “Having her mother as the heroine of a soap opera on paper, who pours out all her feelings, could only have been bad for her at her age”, decrees the couple, who receive in an annex of their Parisian studio, near the Etoile, passing between a London getaway and their Beirut home. However, very quickly, this rich material grabs Hadjithomas and Joreige. They whose work summons up history, a taste for stories, a heritage dissected like an archaeology, see a film there, which will become Memory Box, in theaters January 19.

But how do you approach this deluge of rediscovered memories? Make a documentary out of it? Too self-centered, they fear. With the help of screenwriter Gaëlle Macé, who helps them find their form, they end up establishing the plot of a fiction. It would be the story of a teenager today, Alex, whose mother, Maia, receives a package from Beirut on Christmas Day. The box contains all the memories of a letter she had written for a friend, aged 13 to 18. Alex then delves into his mother’s past. “We thought about the best setting in which to place the plot, admits Joreige. You had to be far from Beirut. We hesitated between Brazil and Canada, where the Lebanese diaspora is important. Finally, we opted for Montreal, a city we love, which allowed us to film the snow, in contrast to the heat of Beirut. »

The script, however, is only a first step. To make the past of Maia, embodied on screen by Manal Issa, plausible, the photos had to be credible. Thus, Khalil Joreige, who in the 1980s was already doing photography, unearthed 10,000 pictures of his own from this period. “They had both the grain of the time but also the sense of fashion, the way of standing, of posing, of dancing”, he remarks.

Mix of fact and fiction

The duo, winner of the Marcel-Duchamp Prize in 2017, drew inspiration from it to create images in all formats – Polaroids, photos with round edges, Photo booths… –, which gives the impression that the actors lived through the 1980s But the duo also “faked” the photos: “We sometimes captured the actors on a green screen in poses similar to the original photos, then superimposed their silhouettes. » Decor of yesteryear and new faces, true and false intertwined…

Directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

Likewise, Joana Hadjithomas, to feed the memory box of the character, compelled herself to mix excerpts from her real adolescent notebooks with a few lines rewritten for the needs of the film, or had the actors interpret phrases formerly pronounced and recorded on audio cassettes.

One day in the spring of 2019, while she was struggling to stage this reinvention, the film crew saw Corinne Ejeil, the one through whom it all happened, arrive. “She hadn’t set foot in Beirut in all this time, it was very moving”, Hadjithomas smiles. His daughter acted as extras for a church scene. And the most attentive spectator can even, in Memory Box, see Corinne’s silhouette slip away, like a benevolent presence.

memory box, by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (1h40). In theaters January 19.

source site-19