Constructed Futures: Haret Hreik

Forum Expanded 2017

The Shiite dominated neighborhood Haret Hreik in Beirut houses the headquarters of the Hezbollah Party, invisible to the outside. In 2006 the Israeli Army bombarded the neighborhood, which Hezbollah then quickly rebuilt. This rebuilding project is part of a military conflict and a geopolitical network in which architecture takes part in the production of space, landscape, and memory.
The video installation shows offices where the reconstruction was planned and designed, one of the rebuilt houses itself, as well as a hall where Hezbollah sympathizers regularly gather to attend video addresses by the party leader Hassan Nasrallah.
What does it mean when new buildings are meant to be added without rupture or break into the existing urban structure and into individual memories? How has the interpretation of resistance by Hezbollah become a dominant project that is manifest spatially? What does building mean if it leaves no room for ruins and commemoration, because it thinks in a logic of brief intervals of warlessness?

by Sandra Schäfer
with Ibtissam Malak, Hassan el-Jeshi, Rahif Fayad Germany 2017 Arabic, English 27’ Colour

With

Ibtissam Malak
Hassan el-Jeshi
Rahif Fayad

Crew

Director	Sandra Schäfer
Cinematography	Sandra Schäfer
Editing	Sandra Schäfer
Sound Design	Martin Ehlers-Falkenberg
Sound	Sandra Boutros
Production Manager	Caroline Kirberg
Producers	Sandra Schäfer, Ekaterina Degot

Produced by

mazefilm

http://www.mazefilm.de/ http://www.mazefilm.de/

Akademie der Künste der Welt

https://www.academycologne.org/de/ https://www.academycologne.org/de/

Urban Subjects

Additional information

Download additional information

Sandra Schäfer

Sandra Schäfer, born in 1970 in Altkirchen, Germany, is an artist living in Berlin. Her artistic works deal with the production of urban and transregional spaces, history, and visual politics. Her works are often the result of longer projects in which she researches the processes of unwrapping and re-reading documents, images, and spatial narratives. Her works have been shown in exhibitions internationally. She has been a member of the feminist distribution project Cinenova in London since 2010.

Filmography

1996 Doch bin ich wirklich; video installation, 38 min. 1997 England–Deutschland; video installation, 171 min. 1998 Mensch, Tanja!; video installation, 30 min. 1999 Kontaktfreudig, offen und gewandt im Umgang; video installation, 7 min. 2000 Die unsichtbare Dienstleistung; video installation, 4 min. 2001 A Country‘s New Dawn; 5 min. 2004 The Making of a Demonstration; 10 min. 2006 Traversée de la Mangrove; 38 min. 2007 Passing the Rainbow; 71 min. 2008 To Act in History; video installation, 21 min. 2011 On the Set of 1978ff; video installation, 58 min. 2013 Notes on Pasolini’s Form of a City. Sana’a, Sabaudia, Rome; video installation, 25 min. 2014 Başakşehir: An Urban Model; video installation 2016 Mleeta; video installation, 12 min., Forum Expanded 2016 2017 Constructed Futures: Haret Hreik

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2017