Join us for this full-day program around archival, editing, and documentary practices for filmmakers and artists working with found footage and archival material and those who are interested in working with hybrid essayistic forms.
Our two facilitators, Lebanese editor and video artist Deena Charara, and experimental filmmaker and archivist Chantal Partamian, will share conceptual frameworks and propose technical approaches to editing archival images in the context of film and video art. The session will further situate archival mediation, media excavation, and “digital sculpting” as decolonial practices.
Partamian’s work focuses on experimental editing techniques to create short projects and video capsules from a pre-existing archive. She will share practices of reassembling fragments of everyday life, intimate gestures, and landscapes into new narratives that challenge and enrich our understanding of the MENA/SWANA region using existing footage shot on Super 8mm and 16mm cameras in towns and villages across the eastern Mediterranean from the 1920s to the 1970s, which comprise Partamian’s Katsakh Mediterranean Archives, through the lens of personal and collective memory.
Deena will shed light on the practice of “emotional editing” — where narrative is shaped not from scripts or continuity, but from fragments and coincidences. She will share how emotion and intuition can guide structure, rhythm, and meaning in the editing process. What Deena refers to as a process of creative excavation: finding story beats, listening for rhythm, and searching through images and sounds until an emotional truth emerges. Through film excerpts, live demonstration, and collective reflection, participants will be invited to experience editing as both a craft and a philosophy: a way of shaping memory, identity, and imagination through the fragments we carry.
The program will include a lunch break and will end with an open discussion between the participants and both artists.
Deena Charara is an award-winning film editor, video artist, and educator from Lebanon. Her work blends archival and found footage into poetic explorations of memory, resilience, and the shifting landscape of the self.
She received Best Editing for Heritages (2015), and several films she has contributed to have earned major international recognition — including a Grand Prix nomination at Sundance for Sous Les Bombes (2008), broadcasts on ARTE, and selections that represented Lebanon at the Oscars and Golden Globes.
From 2008 to 2020, she taught Art of the Moving Image at the Lebanese American University’s School of Architecture and Design, guiding emerging designers and architects in visual literacy and creative practice.
Chantal Partamian is an experimental filmmaker and archivist with a focus on super 8mm and found footage. Her films, recognized and awarded at numerous festivals, are distributed through Vidéographe, Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center.
As an archivist, Partamian specializes in preserving and restoring film reels from the Eastern Mediterranean through the project: Katsakh Mediterranean Archives, while also conducting research on archival practices in conflict zones. Her written works are primarily published in the Revue Hors-Champ.
Chantal Partamian's work spans both the artistic and archival realms, merging experimental cinema with preservation efforts to safeguard the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean region.
