Public Project
Semiramis
Summary
Since 2019, the crisis in Lebanon has been worsening day by day, not dramatically, but like a slow poison, with no one able to predict the end. Like Beirut, the emblematic Semiramis building is falling into ruin. Its owners, who no longer want to maintain it because of inflation, are trying to evict its residents. The building tells us about the crisis through itself and its inhabitants.
Mona, on the fifth floor, is a Lebanese hairdresser married to an Egyptian grocer who can hardly work anymore - her clients cut their own hair. Her children are going abroad because of the lack of opportunities...
Nexdoor, Ali, 24, lives with his parents. He is politically active and involved in a youth movement close to the Communist Party, and has been imprisoned several times during the protests of 2019 and 2020.
On the third floor, Hanaa, 82, lives "for her father" Hussein Mroue. A communist intellectual, he was assassinated in his flat in 1988 by the Amal movement. She spends her days and nights behind her computer transcribing his writings from Arabic to English on Facebook to make them resonate with the crisis.
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