Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, Biokhraphia, 2002

Written and directed by Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh. Producer: Ahskal Alwan, Home works Project, Beirut.

Biokhraphia is about the positioning of theater, sexuality, and censorship. It touches upon crucial current issues vis-à-vis an artist’s position and an artist’s work in the era of globalization. It questions and confronts the role of certain political taboos that are rooted in Lebanese society, but it has no pretense to answer the questions put forward. Conversely, Biokhraphia actually attacks norms and conventions, and plays on the apparently evident – it manipulates eternal and sacred truth, and stands at the edge of the abyss of doubt, ambiguity, uncertainty, and the ‘true/false’ dichotomy. It generates images of the artist that accumulate infinitely into layers, superimposing themselves upon themselves, obscuring the thin line between reality and fiction. The title, Biokhraphia, is a wordplay on ‘biography’ and the Arabic term ‘khraphia’, which variously means delirium, legends, senility, and excrement.