Mute (Kuwait-Lebanon-Syria)
Team
Author and director: Sulayman Al BassamScenography and lighting: Eric Soyer
Composer: Two, or the Dragons
Arabic translation: Hala Omrann
Company manager and subtitler: Wafa Al Fraheen
Admin manager: Saif Al Areef
Assistent lighting designer: Saad Samir
Production manager: Oussama Jamei
Stage manager: Chaminda Kiralage
Cast: Hala Omran, Abed Kobeissi, Ali Hout
Duration: 1 h
Language: Arabic
Subtitles: Estonian, English, Russian
The seismic event of the Beirut port explosion in August 2020 forms the backdrop to Mute, a poetic-political text in which Al Bassam tests possible forms of resistance in the face of escalating violence and unprecedented media disinformation.
Mute is also a personal metaphor for the thinker and artist who chooses absolute silence, the total negation of speech, as his sovereign form of expression. Faced with the dissolution of the political concepts of left and right, and the geopolitical changes taking place in the Arab world, Al-Bassam poses the following question: how do we define artistic resistance today? What would happen were we to abandon traditional forms of narrative critique and posit silence as a tool of resistance?
