March 2025: Object impermanence

Making something heavy in the age of disappearance

After seeing Feyrouz Serhal’s Maroun Returns to Beirut at Metropolis in January, I looked up Maroun Baghdadi’s filmography to see what I hadn’t watched yet. At the bottom, during his early years, I found Kafarkala, a documentary from 1976. I had no idea a film had been made about my village, especially a Baghdadi one. That’s when the hunt to track it do…