QUELQUES INSTANTS DE BONHEUR
France, United Kingdom
A FEW MOMENTS OF HAPPINESS is a seventeen-minute film made from a single screen. In the autumn of 2024, having left Beirut for Paris, a young filmmaker watches Lebanon fall under Israeli bombardment from the far side of her phone. Barely able to leave her bed, she does the only thing still available to her, she begins to record. Over the course of a month she films her own screen as it scrolls, capturing the feed as it arrives, Instagram posts, WhatsApp messages, voice notes, and the daily calls to her father.
Somewhere in that month she understands that she is holding onto the collective memory of a country, and that she is holding it on a device built to distract and to erase. From there the recording changes meaning. It becomes an act of rebellion, a small and private form of resistance against the machine that would let all of it scroll past and disappear.
There is no footage of Beirut that she shot, no return, no reunion. The war reaches her already mediated, made by other people, delivered to a body that is elsewhere, and the only sound that comes directly from the ground is the sound of drones, recorded and sent to her by a friend. At moments the image gives out entirely and the screen goes black, because no picture seems worthy of her father's words. He is a poet, and over the phone the two of them take turns consoling each other. Shaped first through a long solitary edit and then with the editor Rafe Scobey-Thal, the film holds a fractured, screen-based form that moves between private archive and collective history.
The film owns the point of view of the filmmaker. It is the point of view of distance and doubts, of one of the thirteen million Lebanese living in the diaspora, of a generation that watches the world crumble at distance.
I’ve been recording my phone screen for many years for absolutely no reason but to remember how a certain day in my life, or in the world looked like, was presented to me. But this time, everything was so intense and paralysing. The decision to make a film meant re-entering the world instead of simply watching it collapse through my screen. But it also raised a question that became central to the project: what does it mean to witness a war through a device designed for distraction? Recording those images became my form of resistance, refusing to let the war exist only as a passing image on my screen, and refusing to forget narratives that I knew were going to be manipulated in the future.
At the beginning, I wasn’t thinking about cinema yet. I was thinking about archives. Today, our collective memory lives on platforms designed to erase themselves. Stories disappear after twenty-four hours. Testimonies are buried by algorithms, and images quickly vanish in the news cycle. I felt an urgency to capture those fragments before they disappeared. I started editing the material alone in my flat as a kind of digital diary. Only later, when I began working with the editor Rafe Scobey-Thal, did the cinematic questions really emerge: how do you transform a raw personal archive into a film language?
It took seven months in the editing room to find the language of the film. Part of that time was simply about confronting the material. I had nearly ten hours of recordings, screen captures, voice notes, fragments of protests, poems and books. But the deeper challenge was confronting my own point of view. My Lebanese identity has always felt dislocated to me, full of silences and gaps. At first I tried to fill those gaps on screen.
Self-representation is ruthless. I recognise a lie faster on screen than I recognise one in the mirror.
Finding the form of the film meant accepting that incomplete point of view instead of trying to correct it.
My father is a poet, and listening to our conversations again and again during the edit, I realised the images were sometimes distracting from the power of his words. I often found myself closing my eyes while I listened to him. That is where the black screens came from, moments where the viewer is asked to listen rather than watch. In the first version, I spoke much more, and my face was on screen. Slowly, I erased myself from the film. I trusted that my presence would remain through the rhythm of the edit, through the structure, through the choices of sound and silence.
Sound is everything to me. More than the image, it is the tool I use to give a film its rhythm. I listened to this film more than I watched it, and I worked with a remarkable sound engineer, Sara Kaddouri.
A FEW MOMENTS OF HAPPINESS is a seventeen-minute film made from a single screen. In the autumn of 2024, having left Beirut for Paris, a young filmmaker watches Lebanon fall under Israeli bombardment from the far side of her phone. Barely able to leave her bed, she does the only thing still available to her, she begins to record. Over the course of a month she films her own screen as it scrolls, capturing the feed as it arrives, Instagram posts, WhatsApp messages, voice notes, and the daily calls to her father.
Somewhere in that month she understands that she is holding onto the collective memory of a country, and that she is holding it on a device built to distract and to erase. From there the recording changes meaning. It becomes an act of rebellion, a small and private form of resistance against the machine that would let all of it scroll past and disappear.
There is no footage of Beirut that she shot, no return, no reunion. The war reaches her already mediated, made by other people, delivered to a body that is elsewhere, and the only sound that comes directly from the ground is the sound of drones, recorded and sent to her by a friend. At moments the image gives out entirely and the screen goes black, because no picture seems worthy of her father's words. He is a poet, and over the phone the two of them take turns consoling each other. Shaped first through a long solitary edit and then with the editor Rafe Scobey-Thal, the film holds a fractured, screen-based form that moves between private archive and collective history.
The film owns the point of view of the filmmaker. It is the point of view of distance and doubts, of one of the thirteen million Lebanese living in the diaspora, of a generation that watches the world crumble at distance.
