The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli
Spring Grants 2021 - Production Stage
Rania Rafei / Feature Documentary / Lebanon, Qatar / 120 min / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: History, Social Issues, Identity, Docufiction, Creative Documentary
Synopsis
Combining fiction with the documentation of real events, ‘The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli’ uses reality, re-enactment, dreams, memories, mythology, and archive to draw a portrait of the city of Tripoli through five of its important uprisings. By blurring the boundaries between the past and present, the individual and the collective, the film aims to grasp the spirit of the city and its inhabitants and their transformation through history. The five uprisings are depicted through the point of view of five characters for whom the uprisings were decisive in shaping their life and identity. Even if the characters and the stories are composed, a big part of the occurrences in the stories and the internal lives of the characters are based on real events and drawn from the experience of real people. Therefore, to be able to create a synthesis from the dialectic between temporalities and genres, the methodology of work on the film is pivotal. This method is conducted in all aspects of the film, from working with the non-actors to creating the visuals in the real spaces to writing a narration that mixes official historical narratives with subjective ones. The work will be a collaborative effort to shape together a portrait of the city, sculpting with history as a nonlinear and fluid material.
Credits
- Director
- Rania Rafei
- Screenwriter
- Rania Rafei
- Producer
- Jinane Dagher (Orjouane Productions)
- Production Company
- Orjouane Productions
About the Director
Rania Rafei is a Lebanese, Beirut-based film director and artist. She directed numerous documentaries for TV channels covering social and political subjects. She also wrote and directed short fiction films, video essays, installations and an award-winning feature film. Rafei holds a diploma in audiovisual and cinema studies from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA). Between 2006 and 2007, she made two video art projects, 'The Four Seasons: Summer 2006' and 'Brain Cells', both were part of a program in the Ashkal Alwan art venue in Beirut. In 2010 she made an essay documentary 'Notes on Love in Copenhagen'. In 2011 she directed a video art project 'Prologue' that was part of “video works” in the Ashkal Alwan art venue. In 2012, she wrote and directed her first feature debut, '74 The Reconstruction of a Struggle'. The film premiered at the FID Marseille international film festival and was awarded. It was later screened in international festivals around the world and won several prizes, including Best Lebanese Documentary in 2013 and Best Film at the Olhar Cinema Film Festival in Brazil.