We Are Inside

Farah Kassem graduated from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and DocNomads. Her short films My Father Looked Like Abdel Nasser (2012) and You Make a Better Window Than You Do a Door (2017) won awards from many festivals such as Visions du Réel and DOK Leipzig. We Are Inside is her first feature film.  

A word from the selection committee:
After a long absence, Farah Kassen returns to her father’s home in Tripoli. Filming fathers seems like the simplest kind of documentary filmmaking - I film what I know, the ones I love and with whom I would never let my camera down - but it is also the most complex: what space is left for the viewer in such an intimate dialogue, such a personal process? Farah Kassen engages with this exercise in this exemplary saga of a film. We Are Inside: the title sounds like an invitation shouted through a door. We slowly enter the father’s opulent apartment, taking it in: the director does not hesitate to set up the camera in a corner of the room. Side by side or face to face, behind or in front of the camera, frame after frame, the filmmaker freely shifts from being in the shot to making the shot. The young filmmaker and the old poet suss each other out. By playing with frames of the doors, the curtains, and the windows, she frames and surrounds him, but he eludes her. Her father is no fool and he resists his daughter’s endeavour, he does not surrender easily; so to talk to him, she learns his language, poetry. Reality emerges from their long discussions: first his illness, mundane, it sets the pace of her father’s life, later the 2019 revolution rumbling downstairs. The film then bears witness to the history of a country on the brink. Nowadays, this testimony sadly strikes a meaningful chord.
― Clairemma Blot