A double bill featuring Ghassan Salhab’s, Phantom Beirut and Shaden Safieddine Tazi’s, A Few Moments of Happiness. Filmed thirty years apart, these two works hold Beirut as a central protagonist, working through memory, transmission and the search for joy across two generations of filmmakers.

A Few Moments of Happiness, dir. Shaden Safieddine Tazi, 2025, 17 mins
A young woman watches the war in Lebanon through her phone, from her bed in Paris. Through digital images, family voices, and silences, the film explores the dissociation of a generation condemned to witness the destruction of the world from afar. An intimate essay on exile, screens, and the exhaustion of being a witness.

Phantom Beirut, dir. Ghassan Salhab, 1998, 110 mins
Presented in its newly-restored version, Phantom Beirut is set in Lebanon at the end of the 1980s, as Khalil returns home after ten years of absence. Rumours spread across Beirut, at some kind of end to 20 years of conflict, that Khalil (Auoni Kawas) has returned. A ghost, missing and presumed dead in conflict ten years back, was thought to have absconded with his troop’s cash box. Now we follow Khalil as he picks over the bones of a city full of contradictions, friends and enemies haunting him anew.

To tell the story of a nation at a crossroads, director Ghassan Salhab (in his feature debut) fittingly called on an array of genres and techniques. Through his six feature fiction films, numerous documentaries, video works and essays that all defy traditional genre filmmaking archetypes, and with a very distinct cinematic approach, Salhab continues to dissect the aftermath of the civil war on the Lebanese citizens, through interviews with the lead actors about their direct experience of the conflict that defined their lives. 

This programme is brought through Shasha Movies, the independent streaming platform for artist film and video from Middle East and North Africa. 

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