Aujourd’hui
(Al yaoum)

Today, it is raining in Beirut. The traffic seems a little lighter than usual, as if contained by the fixity of the images. Photos, video recordings, places, names, languages, words, writings, speech, multiple materials…  Another territory extending beyond the city becomes clearer and the traffic starts to flow differently, in a more fragmented manner, less sure of its trajectory, more uneasy about the layout of the city. We would like to reassure ourselves a little with “the Fouad Chéhab tunnel, Achrafieh, the statue of Nasser near the corniche, the beach of the American university, Aïn el-Mreïsseh, Jall el-Bahr, the army officers’ beach, the Chatila café…” but we are well and truly in Beirut where the film is being made today, a possible means of motionless transport through time and space. Around fifty years ago, in Al-Qaryatayne in Syria, the historian Jibrail Jabbour photographed a woman who can no longer balance on her head the jar that she used to carry at the time; the Bedouins and their camel herds discover borders after the partition of the desert between several adjacent countries; the director leafs through personal notes made in diaries between 1982 and 1984; other testimonials and images relate the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and 2001-2002 of the Palestinian territories; a woman relates her journey from Ramallah to Amman. Using these intermingled tales, Today avoids all historical interpretation to allow a measurable violence in the deregulation of the regional and inner geography to rise up from a succession of accidents, anomalies, facts and confrontations with no apparent connection. Presences from the past in the images and sound, along with the technical modernity of their storage, visibility and circulation, a rainy day subjected to the work of signs. Of what territories are we truly made up?