Countdown (1995)
Akram Zaatari
Countdown, Akram Zaatari, Lebanon, digital, 7 min, 1995
An episode from the early Lebanese TV series Image + Sound. This episode was shot on Gouraud Street in Gemayzeh and edited by Zaatari in Beirut, Lebanon.
Zaatari was hired in 1995 as the executive producer of a morning television program for Future TV. Lebanon’s television industry had just been reorganized to curb the broadcasting excesses of the previous era; every party and militia across the political spectrum had set up its own station during the civil war. When the conflict ended, the government reduced the more than fifty channels to around ten. Future TV was one of the newer, more professional stations that aggressively recruited young creative types and gave them unfettered access to equipment, along with relative freedom to produce highly experimental documentaries. Zaatari’s earliest videos were originally screened as filler between the morning show’s segments.—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Video Data Bank.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy Video Data Bank © Akram Zaatari. Portrait courtesy © Max Burk.
About the artist
Akram Zaatari (Lebanon) is an artist, archivist, curator, and critical theorist born in Saida, Lebanon, in 1966. His work is concerned with notions of desire, resistance, memory, surveillance, and, in particular, with the production and circulation of images during wartime. He has produced a complex body of work in photography, film, video, installation, and performance that explores self-documentation, the televised mediation of territorial conflicts and wars, and the logic of religious and national resistance. He earned an MA in Media Studies from the New School in New York (1995). Solo exhibitions and retrospective screenings of his work have been presented at Sharjah Art Foundation, Moderna Museet Malmö, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Cinéma du Réel, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, National Portrait Gallery (London), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and The Power Plant. He is the recipient of awards and honours from Ismailia International Film Festival, Beirut International Film Festival, and Video Lisboa, among others. Zaatari has curated film programs for venues including Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Associação Cultural Videobrasil, has undertaken residencies at Banff Centre for the Arts (1997), the Bellagio Center in Las Vegas (2008), DAAD in Berlin (2010), and is a Yanghyun Prize Laureate (2004). He has authored several books, including Against Photography (MACBA, 2018), and is a founding member of the Arab Image Foundation, which aims to collect, study, and disseminate the photographic heritage of the Middle East, North African, and Arab diaspora. He lives and works in Beirut.