The Association for the promotion and exhibition of the arts in Lebanon (APEAL), hosted on March 21st 2017, a special screening at Metropolis-Empire cinema, unveiling “Plain Secret”, a documentary by Artist and Director Roy Dib, portraying the unique experience of an outreach project led with elderly residents of Baalbek.
This event organized in partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland in Lebanon and the Robert A. Matta Arts & Culture Association, witnessed the presence of prominent personalities from the cultural and artistic scenes, and generated a high interest and turn-out from the local, regional and the international media.
APEAL, invited by Studiocur/art to implement an artistic community outreach project in parallel with “The Silent Echo Exhibition” that took place in September and October 2016, had commissioned Zoukak to lead a performance based project with the elderly population of Baalbek. This project consisted of a series of workshops and was concluded by a performance during the final weekend of the exhibition.
Following a successful collaboration in the Ras Masqa “Artists in Residence” program by APEAL/BeMa during the summer of 2016, APEAL has chosen Dib, the award winning Lebanese filmmaker (Teddy Award 2014), to fully document the community outreach program in Baalbek through filming of the workshops and final performance.
“This experience goes beyond the documentation and archiving of an artistic project, for it gives local communities and the larger public the opportunity to relate to art through creating their own performances and through appearing in parallel in a documentary, that will expose their work and showcase it to a wider audience”, said the Director who was present at the screening.
In “Plain Secret”, Dib’s lens follows the participants to the workshops in their daily lives and into the city of Baalbek itself. It reaches out to an age group often neglected by community outreach programs in the arts, and gives the residents of Baalbek a real voice in a cultural claim to their city and memory. Among its many benefits, this documentary is a permanent trace of ephemeral workshops and a performance that has so far not been repeated, and it constitutes important documentation for APEAL, Zoukak, and all the participants to the projects.
“Beyond this archival functionality, the documentary provides a little known insight on
Baalbek, from the perspective of elderly inhabitants of the city. This documentary is impactful in terms of socio-cultural themes addressed in an artistic way, and it is a standalone piece that can be screened before a large public and shown at festivals, for it tackles diverse issues relating to heritage, collective memory, anthropology, the environment and sustainability”, said Mrs. Nada Khoury, artistic vice-president of APEAL.
“Plain Secret” was originally meant to create a 20-30 minutes documentary to serve as an archive, but Dib was behind the initiative to take it to the next level, translating it into a documentary feature of 65 minutes. Combining the progress of the workshops and the final performance with an individual and collective story-telling process, the documentary ended up having a very genuine human interest dimension, directly relating to the lives of the participants, their experience, and their relation to each others, to their city, to their community and to art.