Double-Bill Screening: Tunnel Trade and A Midsummer Nights War

Tunnel Trade:

The Gaza Strip is more isolated today that it has ever been. Since June 15 virtually nothing crosses the borders of what is effectively one of the world’s largest prisons.

There remains, however, one tenuous means of trade between Gaza and the outside world – a network of tunnels built beneath the immense metal wall that separates Gaza from the Egyptian Sinai.

Tunnel Trade takes a frank look at this underground economy from the perspective of the people who run it. Filmed in May 2007 for Al-Jazeera International’s People & Power programme, it explores how – out of necessity – a handful of individuals from Rafah, both entrepreneurs and criminals, use their cross-border contacts to achieve illicitly what politics otherwise makes impossible.

A Midsummer Night’s War:
 
The summer of 2006 was set to mark Beirut’s return to the international stage after years of civil war, reconstruction and a struggle for stability. Instead the city was blockaded and bombed. The country’s much-anticipated summer festivals were cancelled.

A Midsummer Night’s War follows two very different groups of artists and asks whether art and culture can survive the ravages of war. While the young filmmakers of the Beirut DC collective went ahead with their film festival in September of 2006 in a show of defiance, others lost hope and gave up. Documentary filmmaker Lokman Slim wonders if he can ever again return to work as he digs through the rubble of his destroyed archives.