Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist

""I can’t believe this is happening", I said to myself when my father’s body failed unexpectedly, two years ago. Who would have known that he would end up being paraplegic after all this time? We were living a life we could call normal before it proved us wrong. The hospital rooms became our new home where we could cook, live, sleep and gather with the few remaining friends and the family members. My mother, a long-time believer, prays to God and the saints wishing desperately for a change in the situation. When nothing seems to go right, we try to call for a miracle. With my camera, I follow my mother in her perpetual prayers, by questioning her faith and what is keeping her going. I film to try to accept what life put us through, to understand the weakness of the body, its complexity and how it can affect the soul. If the body fails to move, does the soul cease as well? Will my father’s strong hopes help him move again? Through my lens, I explore the human condition and the power of faith while observing a daily struggle become an ordinary way of living."
(Corine Shawi)

"Corine Shawi’s father spends four years in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities in Beirut because of sudden paralysis – a time in which the state of emergency becomes routine and filming becomes a strategy: in search of the right balance of closeness and distance, in search of one’s own position in the structure. Shawi sets herself the task of documenting, putting herself in the picture, keeping the family together and at the same time recording movements and changes.
Family life shifts to the sickrooms. The radio plays, the mother smokes countless cigarettes on the balcony, her eyes and fingers graze figures of saints, she attends Holy Mass in the various facilities and shares her worries about an adult son with her husband and daughter. They argue, laugh and sometimes dance around the sickbed. Between the family capsule and drifting through the city – Beirut, night, cemeteries, sensualities –, the filmmaker inserts interview sequences with her siblings, staged on the backseat of a moving car. Attempts to cope and to draw borders, loneliness in company. Brief moments when wishes and projections of mobility are experimentally translated into virtual space – a gauging of possibilities. A touching description of a status quo and a testimony to resignation and renewal."
(Djamila Grandits - DOK Leipzig)