NVICinema: Letter From A Time Of Exile

A film by Borhane Alawiya | Lebanon/ France/ Belgium | 1988 | 52 min | In Arabic with French subtitles

The internal exile - four characters: Karim, an unemployed journalist who lives in Paris. Rizkallah, a car salesman who works in Brussels. Nessim, a surgeon who came to Strasbourg. Abdallah Karim, a former militia. They don’t know each other. The exile is the only thing that they have in common. The voice and the memory of the narrator brought them together. Beirut, like Borhane Alaouié, finds itself in exile between Paris and Brussels. Shot in a pseudo-documentary style, "Letter From a Time of Exile" presents the stories of these four Lebanese men whose lives have taken unexpected turns due to the Lebanese Civil War.

This film concludes a trilogy of letters that began with "Beirut, The Encounter" (1981) and “Letter From a Time of War” (1984).

Borhane Alaouié was born in South Lebanon in 1941, where his journey in cinema first began. After studying filmmaking in Belgium, he returned to Beirut to launch his career with his debut film Poster vs. Poster. This was followed by his acclaimed 1974 feature Kafr Kasem, which earned the prestigious Tanit d’Or at the Carthage Film Festival and a Diploma at the 1975 Moscow International Film Festival. In 1978, Alaouié directed the documentary It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor, featuring an in-depth conversation with renowned Egyptian architect Hassan Fathi. The film explores Fathi’s vision of modernizing regional architectural practices through the use of local materials, an idea that resonated deeply with Alaouié’s own concerns for cultural identity and social justice. Though his body of work is modest in size, Alaouié’s films left a lasting imprint on both narrative and documentary cinema. His deep engagement with the struggles of Lebanon and the broader Arab world remained at the heart of his cinematic vision.

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