Train-Trains 2: A Bypass

Directed by Rania Stephan

The film is a journey following the traces of the old railway line, linking Lebanon to Palestine, an extension of the so-called Orient Express to the North and Egypt Lines to the South, today out of service. Based on material originally filmed in 1999, it gives voice to marginalised rural and transient residents living near derelict stations. By embedding Polaroid photographs into moving images, the film is also reminiscent of memory and its mechanisms, thus becoming itself an interrogation of what happened in between, now and then. A personal vision of post-civil war Lebanon.