Serge Daney: conversation Nord-Sud (1993) Simone Bitton & Catherine Poitevin

During the Golf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation was a “typically French-Arabic art“ but that it couldn’t happen anymore between himself and his Arabic friends. Therefore, we decided to offer Daney a cinematographic, as well as realistic opportunity to recreate that interrupted dialogue. He had no problem choosing his guest : Elias Sanbar, director of the “Palestinian Studies“ magazine. Elias Sanbar is a Palestinian historian and picture collector, a man in exile who decided to preserve the memory of his people through recording press photographs, family photo albums, postcards, etc. Picture are for Sanbar a proof of his own identity. Daney has spent most of his life watching movies but has always refused to save still pictures. There was, from both side, the strong desire to confront the two different positions towards the pictures and to create therefore a comparison with the North-South relationship.