Catherine Poitevin

Conversation nord-sud : Daney/Sanbar

Catherine Poitevin, Simone Bitton

During the Gulf War, Serge Daney had written that the conversation, according to him "a typically Franco-Arab art", could no longer be established between him and his Arab friends. Saddened by this observation, we wanted to offer him a frame, both real and cinematographic, in which he could renew a dialogue that was interrupted at that moment. The choice of his interlocutor was immediately obvious: Elias Sanbar, Palestinian, historian, director of the magazine "Palestinian Studies", collector of images: an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, album of family, postcards, etc. For Sanbar, the image is a proof of his identity. Daney spent most of his life watching movies, but has always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a very strong desire to confront these two attitudes in the face of the image and to make it, in a way, a parable of the North-South relations.