This back-to-back screening brings together two vastly different cinematic responses from two Lebanese artists, who through the isolation of their subject-matters manage to explore the realities and impacts of a decades long history of conflict and war.

Omar Mismar's highly stylized and surprisingly gory A Frown Gone Mad (2024), focuses on Botox and filler injections as a post-war aesthetic. Trapping viewers on a plastic-wrapped treatment table, along with a constant stream of clients undergoing injectable beauty treatments, this year's IDFA Award winner for Outstanding Artistic Contribution mixes ''the quotidian and the sociopolitical in a simple yet refreshing way, through which a beauty salon becomes a stage of history''. 

Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) by artist and co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, Akram Zaatari, delves into memory, evidence, and the archive, to investigate a rumor that has circulated since the early 1980s: the story of an Israeli fighter pilot who supposedly refused to bomb the school Zaatari's father worked at in their hometown of Saida.

Review of Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013): Lebanese Artist Explores ‘Human Face' of Conflict (New York Times)