{"id":343540,"date":"2026-03-17T09:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T09:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/343540\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T09:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T09:20:12","slug":"a-battered-beirut-portrayed-in-documentary-dream-of-another-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/343540\/","title":{"rendered":"A Battered Beirut Portrayed In Documentary ‘Dream Of Another Summer’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA sense of imminence pervades Dream of Another Summer<\/a>, Irene Bartolom\u00e9<\/a>\u2019s film that\u2019s set in Beirut<\/a>. A sense that something could happen at any moment, perhaps something terrible.<\/p>\n

\n\tBartolom\u00e9, a native of Barcelona, has made Beirut her home for the past six years. She lived through one of those moments of cataclysm \u2013 the August 2020 explosion that leveled part of the city, killing more than 200 people. The blast, powerful enough to be felt in nearby countries, was triggered by the ignition of a huge supply of ammonium nitrate improperly stored at the port.<\/p>\n

\n\tBartolom\u00e9\u2019s feature screened at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival<\/a> in Greece just days after its world premiere at CPH:DOX<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the filmmaker and others living in the city, the explosion brought home \u201cthe true meaning of destruction,\u201d Bartolom\u00e9 writes in a director\u2019s statement. \u201cHowever, I was unable to record the moment, not only because physically or mentally I couldn\u2019t, but because I didn\u2019t aim only to capture reality, I needed time to understand what destruction is to me and what a city is to me.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'Dream<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Dream of Another Summer\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tColibr\u00ed Studio\/Lemu Helu\/The Attic Productions<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhile walking by my neighborhood the days after the explosion, I started seeing the buildings\u2019 broken windows or fallen walls as reflections of the wounded bodies that walked by the streets. Suddenly, the buildings were not inanimate beings but creatures of memory and scars. This terrible event revealed to me the deep relationship that exists between us and the spaces we inhabit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a film about absence and presence and how the ostensible opposites fuse in an ineffable whole. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to capture with the camera something you cannot see,\u201d the filmmaker said at a Q&A following Sunday night\u2019s screening in Thessaloniki.<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED: Experimental Feature \u2018Dream Of Another Summer\u2019 From Beirut-Based Filmmaker Irene Bartolom\u00e9 Takes Top Prize<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tAt the center of the documentary is a mystery person who also is largely absent physically \u2013 a woman named Alicia who we come to understand has returned to Beirut from Spain, much to the dismay of her romantic partner. We hear his growing concern about her decision to leave expressed through voice messages he leaves for her, messages apparently left unanswered.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Director<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirector Irene Bartolom\u00e9<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tColibr\u00ed Studio\/Lemu Helu\/The Attic Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter the Thessaloniki screening, Bartolom\u00e9 told Deadline she views Alicia as an alter ego, fictional in a formal sense, yet true in a larger one.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c[W]e filtered Beirut through the eyes and consciousness of a heroine,\u201d Bartolom\u00e9 writes. \u201cAlicia is the medium to relate to the city\u2014the mediator between the audience and the space. Alicia is a woman lost in the city, who we follow through the streets of Beirut, while an obsession grows on her. Yet, in this film, we (almost) never see Alicia, nor hear her. The audience, the real protagonist, are her eyes and ears. And as witness to this experience, they live what she lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"An<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAn image of damaged grain silos in \u2018Dream of Another Summer\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tColibr\u00ed Studio\/Lemu Helu\/The Attic Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tAlicia\u2019s obsession centers on the state of gigantic grain silos by the port that sustained severe damage in the explosion. Some of them collapsed about a year after the initial blast, and the rest are at great risk of cratering. Alicia enlists the aid of an unseen engineer to help understand the precarity of the structure, their discussions heard over eerie 3D renderings of the silos that resemble X-rays.<\/p>\n

\n\tBartolom\u00e9 continues to live in Beirut, even as Lebanon undergoes another deadly round of bombing and invasion by Israel, which is intent on eradicating Iran-allied Hezbollah forces. Beirut exerts a gravitational pull on her, she suggested during the Q&A.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFirst time I visited in summer 2019, I fell in love. I just fell in love like as if it was a person,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt something mysterious, \u2018I need to come back. I need to move here.\u2019 And after a few months, I was able to do it. That was February 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBartolom\u00e9\u2019s previous two documentary shorts have also been set in large cities \u2013 2016\u2019s The Williamsburg Houses in a section of Brooklyn, NY, and 2017\u2019s Lunch time in Cairo.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m always interested in urbanism. All short films I did before were also about urbanism in other places I had lived,\u201d she explained. \u201cAlso, in relation to the visual approach, it comes from there. I\u2019m not focusing so much on the people but looking at the spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"L-R<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tL-R producer Pere Marzo, director Irene Bartolom\u00e9, TiDF moderator, editor Sandra Fatt\u00e9<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMatthew Carey<\/p>\n

\n\tTo build the narrative for Dream of Another Summer, Bartolom\u00e9 collaborated with an editor, Sandra Fatt\u00e9, a native of Lebanon.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe helped me a lot in this process of trying to create a story, trying to construct the film, because I had all this footage and I came to her with closeups of people, 80 percent of footage [was of] buildings, a performance [of unseeding] a pomegranate,\u201d the director recalled. And she\u2019s like, \u2018What? You brought me all this very different footage. You cannot put all this mix together. It\u2019s like very different films.\u2019 And I went to her and said, \u2018For me, in my world, all this makes sense\u2026 Help me, please.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFatt\u00e9 also participated in Sunday\u2019s Q&A.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was trying to make sense of all this different, not languages, but like to work on them,\u201d Fatt\u00e9 observed of the editing process. \u201cAnd there was also a layer of what\u2019s in the interior, in [Alicia\u2019s] home, and what the narrator or Alicia is writing, plus the 3D images. [It was a challenge] how to tricoter, to weave all this together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"The<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe apartment of \u201cAlicia\u201d in \u2018Dream of Another Summer\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tColibr\u00ed Studio\/Lemu Helu\/The Attic Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tFatt\u00e9 said she also placed emphasis on the order of sequences in the film based on her familiarity with the city.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMaybe because I know Beirut very well, [in the rough cut] one shot from this place and another wasn\u2019t working,\u201d she commeted. \u201cSo, for me, it was important to make the character [Alicia] move in a coherent way also in the city and to weave all this in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Images<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tImages of the remaining silos at Beirut Port two years after the devastating port explosion that tore through the capital.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGetty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tBartolom\u00e9 is heading back to Copenhagen from Thessaloniki for the last screening of Dream of Another Summer at CPH:DOX, to be held on Wednesday. The film is produced by Pere Marzo, Elie Kamal, and Irene Bartolom\u00e9. Cinemtography is by P\u00f4l Seif; the editing is by Fatt\u00e9 and Bartolom\u00e9. Kinda Hassan composed the music.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDream of Another Summer unfolds like an afternoon dream told through almost photographic images, voice messages and chance encounters,\u201d the CPH:DOX program writes. \u201cIrene Bartolom\u00e9\u2019s debut [feature] film views buildings with a slight melancholy as complex beings with memories of what has happened around them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor her part, the filmmaker says of the documentary, \u201cThis film is more than just a portrait of Beirut; it is a vital, sensorial and existential journey through a city that has transformed itself and survived cycles of destruction, perhaps like each of us, who rebuild and transform ourselves based on what happens to us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A sense of imminence pervades Dream of Another Summer, Irene Bartolom\u00e9\u2019s film that\u2019s set in Beirut. A sense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[33437,157327,167918,146,85,167919,46,166248],"class_list":["post-343540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-beirut","tag-cphdox","tag-dream-of-another-summer","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-irene-bartolomu00e9","tag-israel","tag-thessaloniki-international-documentary-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}