A sense of imminence pervades Dream of Another Summer, Irene Bartolomé’s film that’s set in Beirut. A sense that something could happen at any moment, perhaps something terrible.
Bartolomé, a native of Barcelona, has made Beirut her home for the past six years. She lived through one of those moments of cataclysm – the August 2020 explosion that leveled part of the city, killing more than 200 people. The blast, powerful enough to be felt in nearby countries, was triggered by the ignition of a huge supply of ammonium nitrate improperly stored at the port.
Bartolomé’s feature screened at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece just days after its world premiere at CPH:DOX.
For the filmmaker and others living in the city, the explosion brought home “the true meaning of destruction,” Bartolomé writes in a director’s statement. “However, I was unable to record the moment, not only because physically or mentally I couldn’t, but because I didn’t aim only to capture reality, I needed time to understand what destruction is to me and what a city is to me.
‘Dream of Another Summer’
Colibrí Studio/Lemu Helu/The Attic Productions
“While walking by my neighborhood the days after the explosion, I started seeing the buildings’ broken windows or fallen walls as reflections of the wounded bodies that walked by the streets. Suddenly, the buildings were not inanimate beings but creatures of memory and scars. This terrible event revealed to me the deep relationship that exists between us and the spaces we inhabit.”
It’s a film about absence and presence and how the ostensible opposites fuse in an ineffable whole. “We’re trying to capture with the camera something you cannot see,” the filmmaker said at a Q&A following Sunday night’s screening in Thessaloniki.
At the center of the documentary is a mystery person who also is largely absent physically – a woman named Alicia who we come to understand has returned to Beirut from Spain, much to the dismay of her romantic partner. We hear his growing concern about her decision to leave expressed through voice messages he leaves for her, messages apparently left unanswered.
Director Irene Bartolomé
Colibrí Studio/Lemu Helu/The Attic Productions
After the Thessaloniki screening, Bartolomé told Deadline she views Alicia as an alter ego, fictional in a formal sense, yet true in a larger one.
“[W]e filtered Beirut through the eyes and consciousness of a heroine,” Bartolomé writes. “Alicia is the medium to relate to the city—the mediator between the audience and the space. Alicia is a woman lost in the city, who we follow through the streets of Beirut, while an obsession grows on her. Yet, in this film, we (almost) never see Alicia, nor hear her. The audience, the real protagonist, are her eyes and ears. And as witness to this experience, they live what she lives.”
An image of damaged grain silos in ‘Dream of Another Summer’
Colibrí Studio/Lemu Helu/The Attic Productions
Alicia’s obsession centers on the state of gigantic grain silos by the port that sustained severe damage in the explosion. Some of them collapsed about a year after the initial blast, and the rest are at great risk of cratering. Alicia enlists the aid of an unseen engineer to help understand the precarity of the structure, their discussions heard over eerie 3D renderings of the silos that resemble X-rays.
Bartolomé continues to live in Beirut, even as Lebanon undergoes another deadly round of bombing and invasion by Israel, which is intent on eradicating Iran-allied Hezbollah forces. Beirut exerts a gravitational pull on her, she suggested during the Q&A.
“First time I visited in summer 2019, I fell in love. I just fell in love like as if it was a person,” she said. “I felt something mysterious, ‘I need to come back. I need to move here.’ And after a few months, I was able to do it. That was February 2020.”
Bartolomé’s previous two documentary shorts have also been set in large cities – 2016’s The Williamsburg Houses in a section of Brooklyn, NY, and 2017’s Lunch time in Cairo.
“I’m always interested in urbanism. All short films I did before were also about urbanism in other places I had lived,” she explained. “Also, in relation to the visual approach, it comes from there. I’m not focusing so much on the people but looking at the spaces.”
L-R producer Pere Marzo, director Irene Bartolomé, TiDF moderator, editor Sandra Fatté
Matthew Carey
To build the narrative for Dream of Another Summer, Bartolomé collaborated with an editor, Sandra Fatté, a native of Lebanon.
“She helped me a lot in this process of trying to create a story, trying to construct the film, because I had all this footage and I came to her with closeups of people, 80 percent of footage [was of] buildings, a performance [of unseeding] a pomegranate,” the director recalled. And she’s like, ‘What? You brought me all this very different footage. You cannot put all this mix together. It’s like very different films.’ And I went to her and said, ‘For me, in my world, all this makes sense… Help me, please.’”
Fatté also participated in Sunday’s Q&A.
“It was trying to make sense of all this different, not languages, but like to work on them,” Fatté observed of the editing process. “And there was also a layer of what’s in the interior, in [Alicia’s] home, and what the narrator or Alicia is writing, plus the 3D images. [It was a challenge] how to tricoter, to weave all this together.”
The apartment of “Alicia” in ‘Dream of Another Summer’
Colibrí Studio/Lemu Helu/The Attic Productions
Fatté said she also placed emphasis on the order of sequences in the film based on her familiarity with the city.
“Maybe because I know Beirut very well, [in the rough cut] one shot from this place and another wasn’t working,” she commeted. “So, for me, it was important to make the character [Alicia] move in a coherent way also in the city and to weave all this in.”
Images of the remaining silos at Beirut Port two years after the devastating port explosion that tore through the capital.
Getty Images
Bartolomé is heading back to Copenhagen from Thessaloniki for the last screening of Dream of Another Summer at CPH:DOX, to be held on Wednesday. The film is produced by Pere Marzo, Elie Kamal, and Irene Bartolomé. Cinemtography is by Pôl Seif; the editing is by Fatté and Bartolomé. Kinda Hassan composed the music.
“Dream of Another Summer unfolds like an afternoon dream told through almost photographic images, voice messages and chance encounters,” the CPH:DOX program writes. “Irene Bartolomé’s debut [feature] film views buildings with a slight melancholy as complex beings with memories of what has happened around them.”
For her part, the filmmaker says of the documentary, “This film is more than just a portrait of Beirut; it is a vital, sensorial and existential journey through a city that has transformed itself and survived cycles of destruction, perhaps like each of us, who rebuild and transform ourselves based on what happens to us.”