The Lebanese Rocket Society: The strange tale of the Lebanese Space adventure

In the early ’60s, during the cold war and the apex of Pan Arabism, a group of utopian students and researchers enters the race to space and create the Lebanese Rocket Society. Sometimes, dreams can overtake a tormented history…

Filmmakers Bio:

Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, being documentary or fiction film.

The artists are known for their long-term research based on personal or political documents, with particular interests in the traces of the invisible and the absent, histories kept secret such as the disappearances during the Lebanese Civil War, a forgotten space project from the 1960s, the strange consequences of Internet scams and spams or the geological and archaeological undergrounds of cities. Among their major artworks, Circle of Confusion (1997), Lasting Images (2003), The Lebanese Rocket Society (2011), SCAMS (2014), I stared at Beauty So Much (2016) and Unconformities (2017), showcased at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize.