Etel Adnan

Seen through the work of eight leading artists from the Middle East, Axis of Light is a poignant and absorbing observation of the influences of conflict.

The film reconstructs through an array of visual fragments, a multiplicity of languages, of peoples and their identities, the unique portrait of the poet and painter Etel Adnan.

Michael Shamberg's P.S. Beirut, Chapter One is a personal journey to Beirut and the first chapter of a series bent on «discovering» the lost briefcase of Walter Benjamin which went missing when Benjamin's body was found

Joana Hadjithomas and the artist and poet Etel Adnan met fifteen years ago. They quickly became close, sharing a city that they had never been to: Smyrna, in Turkey. Joana’s paternal Greek family were forced into exile from Smyrna by the Turkish armies after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Etel’s Greek mother was also born in Smyrna and was married to a Syrian officer of the Ottoman Army and exiled in Lebanon after the fall of the empire. Etel and Joana have both lived in an imaginary Smyrna, today called Izmir, without ever setting foot there. Nowadays they are confronted with the transmission of history and trauma, questioning their attachment to objects, places, imaginary constructions and mythologies without images. What is to be done with the sorrow of our parents? Their personal experiences, their stories serve as a background to the region’s changes after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the evolution of the borders questioning the notion of identity and belonging.

The film reconstructs through an array of visual fragments, a multiplicity of languages, of peoples and their identities, the unique portrait of the poet and painter Etel Adnan.

Michael Shamberg's P.S. Beirut, Chapter One is a personal journey to Beirut and the first chapter of a series bent on «discovering» the lost briefcase of Walter Benjamin which went missing when Benjamin's body was found

In the 1980s, Adnan regularly traveled with a Super-8mm camera in hand. She visited New York frequently, staying at a friend’s apartment in a high-rise overlooking the East River. While there, she would repeatedly attempt to capture the sun touching skyscrapers’ windows, the geometry of bridges, the marriage of light and water, the movement of barges on the river, the shapes of factory smoke – the oddly meditative poetry of inexorable motion at the immediate edge of city life. The footage was retrieved and digitized three decades later, and edited into a feature-length film, MOTION, which premiered at Documenta 13 in 2012. — BIDOUN

In the 1980s, Adnan regularly traveled with a Super-8mm camera in hand. She visited New York frequently, staying at a friend’s apartment in a high-rise overlooking the East River. While there, she would repeatedly attempt to capture the sun touching skyscrapers’ windows, the geometry of bridges, the marriage of light and water, the movement of barges on the river, the shapes of factory smoke – the oddly meditative poetry of inexorable motion at the immediate edge of city life. The footage was retrieved and digitized three decades later, and edited into a feature-length film, MOTION, which premiered at Documenta 13 in 2012. — BIDOUN