The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud (2018, United States)
Feature-Length Documentary, Experimental, Non-Fiction
Running Time: 1 hour 16 minutes
Director: Joanne Nucho, Rosy Kuftedjian
Synopsis:
The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud is a 72-minute experimental non-fiction film about a working-class suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, called Bourj Hammoud, made as a collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Joanne Nucho and Lebanese artist Rosy Kuftedjian. Bourj Hammoud has long been a hub for migration; it was urbanized in the 1930s to permanently settle Armenian refugees of the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire and subsequent decades brought waves of rural to urban migration from elsewhere in Lebanon. Today, it remains a diverse district that is also home to migrants and displaced people from Syria and elsewhere. The project was filmed over a period of seven years (2008-2015) with a final screening for participants in 2018. The film unfolds as an exquisite corpse experiment, with each participant recounting a story, memory and drawing to reveal overlapping histories of displacement through their sketches and narrations of the city. These stories and drawings shape the narrative of the film, which is anchored in the city’s constantly shifting infrastructures. “The Narrow Streets” reveals how different people experience rootedness and displacement through the changing built environment of the city. The result is a lyrical ethnographic reflection on history and the materiality of urban space narrated by longtime residents and recent arrivals to Bourj Hammoud. The project was completed with the support of a Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in ethnographic film from the Wenner Gren Foundation.
Notable Screenings:
- Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
- Alwan for the Arts
- Recipient of the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film from the Wenner Gren Foundation
