Casting for a film, Ihsan’s diary

Lamia Joreige is holding auditions in Beirut for a film based on a 1915 manuscript by a soldier in the Ottoman army. The actors interpret scenes, discuss roles and reflect on WWI and today, while a drawing of Jerusalem unfolds.

In Beirut, Palestinian and Lebanese actors are working on a script for a future film: the diary of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman, a young Ottoman soldier from Jerusalem, written in 1915. The film to be made is not pivotal here – what is important is the film unfolding before our eyes and the film that each of them imagines for themselves. All these bodies telling the story of one body or this voice uniting all of them, here the audition is no longer a moment of selection but of a coming together and an encounter. In Ihsan’s writing, the actors recognise their own anxieties and anger. The texts reveal continuities and still unanswered questions despite the century separating them from him. The times are so far away, yet so similar, nothing has changed: in Palestine, war is still being waged, and today again there is famine in Gaza. Ihsan dreams, “my homeland is the world”, his thinking collides against the repetition of the world – the actors’ world, which is telling its story through them. They know the history that has unfolded since Ihsam lived and are telling the story of their own life experience today. Behind them, appear the sketched outlines of Jerusalem never seen, never visited. A Jerusalem whose access remains barred to them. “And how do you imagine Jerusalem today?” — “Very beautiful”, one young woman replies, her throat so tight that the shot itself tightens and vacillates. The city taking shape behind them – and differently through their words – creates a depth and contrast, reveals the times and helps the film convey its simplest and perhaps most magnificent proposition: that of watching them stand there, bright and radiant with their youth and hopes, and yes, why not, their hopes. 

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar