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In search of a good night’s sleep, video pioneer, cinema auteur, and television producer Mohamed Soueid has collected stories from those around him on and off for 15 years. The cumulative footage, like daydreams, took a circuitous path to yield this roaming and quietly disarming work. Unfolding over time and locations across Beirut, the tale brushes with melancholy, yearning, tenderness, everyday camaraderie, personal histories, and an all-consuming love of cinema. Soueid’s images denote the passage of time through subsequent video technologies—some of the most intimate passages captured on an iPhone—their occasional grit still carrying the warmth of an inquisitive interviewer behind the camera. While particularly affecting in light of the devastating blast that rocked Beirut in August 2020, this latest addition to Soueid’s prolific, expansive filmography continues his challenge to easy timelines and narratives. When you lay your head down, do you dare to dream? The filmmaker dedicates this presentation to Jytte Jensen, who last hosted Soueid at MoMA in 2011.
Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.
Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black and by Steven Tisch, with major contributions from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Karen and Gary Winnick, and The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.
