The Lebanese Rocket Society + Talkback

ArteEast’s Arab Film Series, in partnership with the Arab American National Museum and the Arab Film and Media Institute, is pleased to present The Lebanese Rocket Society, a feature-length documentary directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

In the early 1960s, during the Cold War and the apex of Pan-Arabism, a group of utopian students and researchers enters the race to space and create the Lebanese Rocket Society. Sometimes, dreams can overtake a tormented history…

Note: This program is available for audiences in the United States from August 28 at 12:00 AM EDT to August 29 at 11:59 pm EDT

The Lebanese Rocket Society program will be accompanied by a discussion with filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

About the Filmmakers
Filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, being documentary or fiction film. They are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents, with particular interests in the traces of the invisible and the absent, histories kept secret such as the disappearances during the Lebanese Civil War, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of Internet scams and spams or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities. Among their major artworks, Circle of Confusion (1997), Lasting Images (2003), The Lebanese Rocket Society (2013), SCAMS (2014), I Stared at Beauty So Much (2016) and Unconformities (2017), showcased at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize.