Rasha Salti présente Géographies de Chaghig Arzoumanian

24.10 8:30 p.m. * Screening of Géographies by Chaghig Arzoumanian and conversation between the filmmaker and Rasha Salti (this screening will follow the presentation of the stage performance Elegie d’une disparition: from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at Friche Belle de Mai)

Géographies by Chaghig Arzoumanian,

2015, Lebanon, 72 minutes in Armenian Chaghig Arzoumanian is 27, but she could be a thousand years old: in voice-over, she personally takes charge of her family’s past, the sedimentation of first names, stories, journeys and photographs passed down to her in fragments, through hearsay and anecdotes. Her Armenian genealogy, which takes on mythical proportions, is inscribed anew in today’s landscapes. “The ruins have fused with the earth,” we hear from the Anatolian plain that her grandparents left as children at the beginning of the Armenian genocide. But the filmmaker discovers other exiles beneath this exile, older ones, whose ghosts she embeds in the present—families persecuted during the sultanate in the sixteenth century, children spared in 1915 by the chance of a medical circumcision, the severed head of a husband discovered by his wife. This historical violence is counterpointed by the intimate, warmly familial radiance of more recent stories. Topographical abstraction gives way beneath the family narrative: a man makes three boats from an orange; fruit appears superimposed on a barren field. From Anatolia, exile led to Beirut, where Chaghig Arzoumanian was born, but one branch of the family turned toward Cairo, Damascus, Jaffa… The map becomes a tapestry of multiple, changing colors and patterns—an epic woven from individual threads. (Charlotte Garson) Chaghig Arzoumanian lives and works in Lebanon and France. Her grandparents left their native village of Burunkisla as children during the 1915 Armenian genocide. She was born in Beirut in 1988 and currently works between Paris and Beirut. She graduated from the University of Paris VIII, with dual master’s degrees in cinema and the preservation of cinematographic heritage, and trained in film restoration at the Portuguese film archive laboratory (ANIM). She has directed several short films and a medium-length film: Au retour des marées. Geographies is her first feature-length film. In 2013, she co-edited the documentary E-muet, directed by Corine Shawi, which premiered at FID Marseille. Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer and curator of art and cinema. She was a programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival (2011-2016) and, since 2017, has been a program officer in the Society and Culture Unit at Arte France for La Lucarne. She co-curated Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s until Now with Jytte Jensen (MoMA New York, 2010-2012). She was one of the curators of the 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011). She directed the first session of the RAW Residency Academy at the Centre for Art, Knowledge and Society (Dakar 2016). She programmed the lecture and screening series “Palestine: Territory, Memory, Projections” (Mucem, La compagnie lieu de création, Marseille, 2017). With Kristine Khouri, she co-curated the documentary and archival exhibition Past Disquiet, which was presented at MACBA (Barcelona 2015), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2016), the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago, 2018), the Sursock Museum (Beirut, 2018), Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town, 2023), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2024) and Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2025). In 2026, she was part of the curatorial team led by Koyo Kouoh for the 61st Venice Biennale. Salti edited the publication Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Filmmakers (2006, ArteEast and Rattapallax Press), Beirut Bereft, The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2010, in collaboration with photographer Ziad Antar), and I Would Have Smiled: A Tribute to Myrtle Winter-Chaumeny, with Issam Nassar, in 2010.