A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing by the ruins". The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring capitalist and colonial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, archives and ruins, histories of sex, and histories of empire, all commingle in this essay film. What transpires is a web of visible and invisible threads where homosexuality in the Middle East today seems to be enmeshe
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Raed Rafei Director
United States release September 9, 2021 · Produced in Lebanon, United States · Original title Al-Atlal
Production
Lebanon · United States
Produced in
Languages
Original title
Al-Atlal
Original language
English
Spoken on screen
Arabic
Release dates
United States · September 9, 2021
Digital
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