Phantom Beirut

Lebanon at the end of the ’80s. Ghassan Salhab’s debut follows Khalil as he returns to Beirut under a new identity, forced to confront the old friends and comrades he left behind following his faked death a decade earlier. PHANTOM BEIRUT is a haunting exploration of the official silences and collective amnesias that stalk the lives of those who live through conflict.      

“In his first feature film, helmer Ghassan Salhab weaves the familiar Lebanese themes of exile, destruction, memory, hope, and illusions into a poem to a beloved city and its people, as scarred as its buildings.”
– Variety                                 

He collaborates on various projects and teaches film in Lebanon. He has directed feature films such as ‘Beyrouth Fantôme’, ‘Terra Incognita’, ‘The Last Man’, ‘1958’, ‘The Mountain’, ‘The Valley’, ‘An Open Rose/Warda’, ‘The River’ and ‘Night Is Day’. In addition to numerous essays and different video works, including ‘(Posthumous)’, ‘Chinese Ink’, ‘Son Image’, and ‘Le Voyage Immobile’, with Mohamed Soueid. La Rochelle International Film Festival, JCC Carthage, GIFF (Mexico), and La Cinémathèque du Québec have paid tribute to his work, as well as a retrospective in Paris. He has also published different texts and articles in various magazines, and two books: Fragments du Livre du Naufrage and À Contre-Jour (Depuis Beyrouth).