workshop: 7 x el hermel: smoke on water

Media - polaroid photography and video
Date: July 2007
Location: Hermel
Facilitator: Rania Stephan

Videos will be available shortly

In July 2007, documentary filmmaker Rania Stephan led a workshop with a group of seven youths in Hermel using Polaroid and digital video. This is the second workshop that Rania has conducted in collaboration with Lens on Lebanon. The first, in February 2007, was held in Marjayoun, south Lebanon. For her second workshop Rania chose the remote location of Hermel, a town situated in north-east Lebanon, on the border with Syria. Within Lebanon this area is renown for being an important Hizbollah stronghold - it is often referred to as The City of Martyrs - and a major producer of Hashish.

Rania, who had never been to Hermel, was interested in learning about the community from its inhabitants. She consciously sought to use the workshop setting as creative and exploratory space through which to move beyond the stereotypes that have tended to be reflexively associated with Hermel. Inam al-Faqih, who works in Hermel's public library, helped LOL coordinator Samar Maakaron and Rania select a group of participants for the workshop, which was held over the course of three days in the local library. Rania invited each of the seven participants to show her Hermel, as they knew it - representing the social life of the town through a series of visual images that captured their personal memories and experiences. On the first day each participant was given a Polaroid camera, and the workshop began with Rania giving the group some instruction in the basics of photography and image making. Over the course of the following two days, participants were instructed to take a series of photos that they felt reflected life in Hermel. While some gathered images of their favorite places, or of well-known tourist sites, others structured their photo narratives around their everyday routines, taking photos of family and friends and other aspects of their personal lives.

On the third day participants reported back to the group and each was encouraged to contextualize their photos and describe the significance of each image, and their reason for taking it. Rania invited each participant to analyze their photos for the rest of the group, and recorded their accounts on digital video. This process of sharing work revealed contradictory narrative threads, each of which made visible a quite different perspective on life in Hermel, which moved the process of representation far beyond the clich s often associated with the town. Interestingly, while a number of the photos focused on the same subjects - for instance, a famous historic site in the town, aspects of the landscape, or the Assi River Falls - the descriptions provided by each participant were radically different. The seven photo narratives were, subsequently, edited by Rania into a 28-minute sequence, entitled Smoke on the Water: 7 x El Hermel, and duplicate copies of the film were given to the participants. 13 A public screening of Smoke on the Water was held in Hermel for participants, their families and other notables from the community in September 2007. Rania also presented the work of LOL and the collaborative workshop she led in Hermel as part of an IFPO conference in Beirut in September 2007.

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