Anna Luise Schubert, Ines Weizman (CDA)

2019, 5’

This short film looks at the work of the Lebanese architect Antoine Tabet (1907–1964) told through two of his buildings and by two protagonists. One building, the Sagesse College, built in Beirut in 1937, is introduced by his son Jad Tabet, a Lebanese historian and president of the Order of Engineers and Architects in Lebanon. The other, the Raja Rais housing complex, was built in Haifa around the same time and has survived thanks to the efforts of Waleed Karkabi, a devoted preservationist and head of the Haifa Municipality. Despite the similarities between these buildings and the obvious continuities in Tabet’s work across the borders of the Middle East, the story of his work remains largely inaccessible to both protagonists, as they are not allowed to work together nor exchange their knowledge officially. This film is a trailer depicting the CDA’s attempts to untangle a web of relations, political and professional, that extended from Beirut to Tripoli and Damascus and as far south as Gaza and Cairo, a fluid geography fractured by national borders that follow the infamous Sykes-Picot Line.