Mondial 2010

"Mondial 2010 is a film on love and place. A Lebanese gay couple decides to take a road trip to Ramallah. The film is recorded with their camera as they chronicle their journey. The viewers are invited into the universe of a fading city through the couple's conversations.

It presents a discussion of institutional borders in modern day Middle East. It uses video as an apparatus to transgress boundaries that are inflicted on people in spite of them. It is worth mentioning that the relations between Israelis and the Lebanese are governed by the 1943 Lebanese Criminal Code and the 1955 Lebanese Anti-Israeli Boycott Law, the former of which forbids any interaction with nationals of enemy states, and the latter of which specifies Israelis, making a trip for a Lebanese citizen to Israel (or Palestinian Territories) impossible.

So it is a travel film in a trajectory that doesn’t allow travel, starring two male lovers, in a setting where homosexuality is a punishable felony. Shot with a hand-held camcorder, Mondial 2010 borrows the aesthetics of a travel video log. It normalizes the abnormal, and by doing so creates its own universe of possibility. It is a shift from the mainstream passive view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, which places the victim/oppressor in the forefront of the produced imagery. The video glides over this conflict with an upper hand."

Roy Dib in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)