An Evening with Joyce Joumaa
6 minutes
In Disappearance Is Not Death, her newest film, which screens in its world theatrical premiere following its presentation at the 18th Lyon Biennial, Joumaa interrogates these histories through speculation and reenactment. The work considers the military leader and folk hero Youssef Bey Karam, who led a rebellion against Ottoman rule in the 1860s and was later driven into exile, where he penned early texts in defense of Lebanese sovereignty. The film blends fact and fiction in juxtaposing Karam’s words, sites of his memorialization in Northern Lebanon, and staged interviews with local residents. Through their differing musings on this historical figure, the film puts the idea of a national hero to the test—a prism alternatively read as galvanizing, righteous, hollow, or fraught. Joumaa explores the intersection of present-day lived experiences with narratives of self-determination in Lebanon and the Arab world more broadly. “History does not require causality to produce proximity….,” she notes. “The past is continually rewritten by those who now inhabit its aftermath.”