Khalil joreige biography

Filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige work between photography, installations, video, and cinema, whether documentary or fiction films.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are Lebanese filmmakers and artists.
Key figure of contemporary Lebanese cinema, along with Joana Hadjithomas, with whom he has worked in partnership since the beginning of his career.

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Born in 1969 in Beirut, Lebanon. Live and work between Paris, France and Beirut, Lebanon.

Biography

In films and installations, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige examine the unreliability of images, history, memories, and even first-person experiences in narrating the world around us, especially in the face of atrocities and situations of hopelessness. Hadjithomas and Joreige delve into their protagonists’ desires to believe that what they are experiencing, personally or vicariously, individually or collectively, is not only real but creates a connection between their own experience and the experiences of others that can lead to a mutual emancipation from suffering. Understanding film as a territory in itself, Hadjithomas and Joreige explore the potential in this medium to expand the borders of cohabited spaces and create a more inclusive world where new realms of collective, creative potential and commiseration can exist. (Recipients of the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Paris in 2017)

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Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige were both born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1969. They collaborate as artists and filmmakers, creating thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema. Over the last fifteen years, the duo has particularly focused on the fabrication of images andthe construction of imaginaries. Using personal or political elements to record stories that were stifled in prevailing history, Hadjithomas and Joreige explore the relationship between image and narrative.

Their poignant, complex works are often intimate, established through conversations with various people they meet. Where sites have been transformed or demolished, particularly through war, Hadjithomas and Joreige's work provides a social memory for those affected, giving potency to the visible remnants. Applying a documentary approach to work that rewrites history raises questions about belief, fragmentation, transmission-bias, and who has the right to be the custodian of lapsed memories. Highlighting absence by docum

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Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, being documentary or fiction film.

Together, they have directed numerous films that have been shown and multi awarded in the most important international film festivals as Cannes film festival, Berlinale, Locarno or Toronto before having theatrical releases in many countries. Their films include Memory Box (2021); ISMYRNA (2016); The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of The Lebanese Space Race (2012), Khiam 2000-2007 (2008); Je Veux Voir (I Want To See) (2008), starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué, A Perfect Day (2005), The Lost Film (2003); and Around the Pink House (1999). Several retrospectives of their films have been presented in renowned institutions such as MoMA (New York), Flaherty Seminar (New York), Torino Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive (Cam