vendredi, juillet 13, 2012

I did not know while watching the 2012 documentary "autoportrait" at the FID (Marseille film festival), that I would have such great meetings after having simply congratulated the fabulous editing work of Eugénie, also a poet & a philosopher. Shot in Beirut in 1972 with an early Sony video system, the film stayed 40 years in the drawer. It was worth for the footage to wait in the dark, because the light that Eugénie revealed is fascinating. Then I met the autoportrait en personne, Simone Fattal. Born in Damas in 1942, she later became a sculptor and the founder of the American poetry publishing house Post Apollo Press, as I happened to know during our conversation on the boat to la pointe rouge. Jocelyn Saab, the film director who made in 2005 the controversial film "Dunia" (about female pleasure in conservative Egypt), is the one who unearthed the forgotten footage. Thanks to her, to Eugénie and Kevin Ayers!