Al Rajol Zou Anna’l Azzahabi

A meeting between “a filmmaker hiding behind his camera and a man willing to open up in front of the lens”. That year, ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri was the leader of the Lebanese opposition. For some, he was the country’s saviour, for others, its gravedigger. As a businessman running a real-estate empire through his company, Solidere, and actively contributing to rebuilding Beirut, Hariri was the epitome of the man of power. The filmmaker’s friends reproach him for succumbing to the charm, his mother had warned him… but the game is inviting and the filmmaker is trapped by his character. His film then becomes a mise en scène of the mishaps that stalk a critical intellectual, the character’s force and charisma, and the paradoxes of the documentary genre. E.H. “He refuted all my arguments and, little by little, I found myself inextricably trapped. I could easily have not admitted this reality in the editing. I could have filmed things that would have served to denounce or condemn him as a man of power. But I wanted to take my approach through to the end and confess that when the intellectual or filmmaker lays down his arms, he loses against the man of power. He even goes as far as losing his title of filmmaker. Yet, the film ended up as a game, for me. A game around the problem that can be caused by a frank relationship between an author and a man of power and money.”