As part of Focus Tripoli: Tripoli, Arab cultural capital 2024the Arab World Institute in Paris hosted, this Saturday, November 23, the screening of Cilama by Hady Zaccak. This film revealed the golden age of cinema in Tripoli, mixing memories of love, culture and war.
The screening of the film Cilama by Hady Zaccak, produced in 2024, was held this Saturday at the Arab World Institute in Paris, as part of Focus Tripoli: Tripoli, Arab cultural capital 2024. This documentary, both poetic and memorial, constitutes a true album retracing the collective memory of cinema in the heart of Tripoli, city of culture and history.
Through an immersion in photos and archive images, the viewer accompanies the director on an intimate exploration of the old cinemas of Tripoli. The director wanders from room to room, revealing a glorious past through the stories of the inhabitants of this city recently designated Arab Cultural Capital. In search of traces of a bygone era, he raises the dust, illuminates the cobwebs with the light of the camera and gives new life to places once filled with dreams, now deserted.
Cinema, mirror of a troubled era
With his documentarian glasses, Hady Zaccak sets out in search of evidence, clues and fragments of stories. These vibrant testimonies recreate a golden age when cinemas were temples of culture and wonder. The director also evokes the wounds left by conflicts, when cinemas, far from being simple places of entertainment, became areas of confrontation, torn apart by violence.
A quest between dream and fiction
“Prisoner of cinema in a real world”, Hady Zaccak describes his quest as a search for the “temples and rites” of this magical era. Through his images, he reveals an authentic world, marked by the laughter of children in the streets of Tripoli, by the colorful posters of old films and by the memories of a carefree youth. This introspective journey, punctuated by an immersive soundtrack, plunges the viewer into the soul of a Tripoli that is both luminous and tragic.
The vestiges of a collective memory
“Standing on the rubble of my youth,” says Hady Zaccak, whose voice can be heard asking questions. Like Rousseau’s solitary walker, he wanders through the alleys, capturing scraps of truth and history which he generously shares on the big screen. His photos blend into the images of his film, retracing the vestiges of a past mixed with dreams and reality. This journey makes the spectators themselves actors, taking them into stories of cinemas built, destroyed or abandoned.
What will remain of the past of cinemas in Tripoli?
One hundred years later, what will remain of the history of these old Lebanese cinema halls in Tripoli? Cilama offers an answer to this question: a fragile but precious memory, captured in still images and authentic testimonies from well-known film buffs and city residents. Like this non-existent Hakawati that he is constantly searching for, Hady Zaccak is not content with filming places; he explores its soul, diving into stories in which love stories and war traumas intersect. Through this double plot – one soft and nostalgic, the other brutal and jerky – the cinema loses the magic of memories. It then becomes the reflection of a merciless reality, that of a country marked by a bloody history and broken destinies.
A work between fiction and history
The film mixes fiction and reality, reconstituting vanished eras while questioning an uncertain present. Archival footage mixes with contemporary stories to offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of Tripoli, a city with a complex and often painful history. Hady Zaccak also explores the links between abandoned places and the human quest for transcendence, showing how cinemas, even in times of decline, remain places of escape and purification. The fighters come to seek, in these unusual and unusual cinemas, a transcendental dimension or a space of release where they purge, in their own way, their passions.
An end in search of beginnings
Hady Zaccak continues to return to this dusty past which he considers to be a fertile seed. “Because I’m looking for beginnings,” he confides on the big screen, bringing these worn-out reels and their forgotten stories back to life. Cilama is a profoundly human work, a vibrant tribute to the culture and history of Tripoli, and a reflection on the fragility of memory in the face of the weight of time.
