Since Sumerian times, the word 'paradise' has been associated with Lebanon. In the 1950s and 60s, the Middle Eastern world rushed to Beirut to share in the freedom and joy of the Lebanese people. But multiple conflicts have transformed this idyllic world. Against a backdrop of timeless landscapes, the voices of women pierce through the silence and speak of death, always lurking in the shadows, while a diabolic male figure, the 'left-footed one', sets fires.
With this film Christian Barani offers us another poetic essay in the form of a journey following the infernal traces of a possible paradise.
Projections
Christian Barani is born in 1959 and lives in Paris. He ends his studies with a master’s degree in science economic in the Faculty of Nice.
In the 90s, the arrival of the format DV pushes aside its relation in the images and allows him to acquire a freedom of creation and production. He builds a practice which associates the field of the documentary with the Visual Arts. Over a period of 10 years, he films in Kazakhstan with G. Reynard the social transformations of this country of Ex Union Soviétique, he films in Nepal during the Maoist revolution, in Namibia, in Ethiopia, in Cyprus, in Dubai, in the Lebanon ...
His process of realization sets up a performative device which is going to generate images without in priori. It is about experience committing a body / camera walking in the space. He defines a rules of the game which composes with the coincidence and the improvisation. No preliminary scenario. Everything takes place in an instant. Never a sequence is twice shot. What is void and void.
In the term of the experience, a material of images and sounds is collected. He will take various forms according to the project to come and from places of exhibition : movie in room, movie deployed in the space of exhibition, installation, performance …
He realize in parallel numerous commissioned works for museums as the House Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières, the Royal Institute of the Natural sciences of Brussels, the Center of Culture of Rennes, Agora : biennial event of Architecture of Bordeaux, Mons Mémorial Museum in Belgium, The Museum of Confluences in Lyon, The City of the architecture and the heritage of Paris …
From 1990 till 2006, he creates to the National School of Industrial Design, the department Images in Movement, the unit of Experiment Images and Sound (Xis- with Jeff Guess, Extensions - dynamics of writings with frédéric dumond.
In 2000, he cofounds, with Véronique Barani and Sabine Massenet, a structure of distribution of videos artists " estceunebonnenouvelle " which is going to include more than hundred international artists and a collection understanding more than 500 movies.
Filmography
Paradis, 73 min, 2018
Prolégomènes à la lumière, 7 min, 2013
Like a strategy, 45 min, 2012
My Dubaï Life, 60 min, 2011
Mine De Rien, 74 min, 2004
Parce Que, 60 min, 2000
Screenings
09/2018: Séance Phantom, MK2 Beaubourg, Paris, France