The Last Man

Feature film screening as part of the Arab Film Festival

Sunday, November 04, 2007
7:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Writer's Guild Theater
135 South Doheny Drive

Ghassan Salhab's The Last Man evokes the layers of the past that make up Beirut's sedimented present. Rather than approach history and politics head-on, Salhab's film does its work through an unlikely idea: a vampire is sucking the lifeblood from Beirut's citizenry, one victim at a time. A respected doctor, Khalil Shams (Carlos Chahine), whom we see scuba-diving in one of the film's many enigmatic and beautiful sequences, begins to suspect he himself is the vampire. Recoiling from sunlight, Dr. Shams explores the darker dimensions of a wintry Beirut (seen through Jacques Bouquin's stunning cinematography) as he increasingly questions his own capacity for intimate violence. Titled Ruins in Arabic, this dream-like film suggests Beirut as a city continually searching for ways to forget its past, all the while unable to stem the slow bleed of of history back into the City's consciousness.

Director: Ghassan Salhab

Lebanon/France, 2006, 101 minutes

This screening is part of the Arab Film Festival. For details on the festival, please visit www.aff.org

Cost: $10.00 general admission, $8.00 students/seniors

Special Instructions

This film is being shown together with the short film Garbage and the ticket price includes both films.

Sponsor(s): , Arab Film Festival