The Disappearance of Goya

Dir. Toni Geitani. Lebanon. 2017, 55 mins. In Arabic with English subtitles. A generation too young to have lived through war tries to make sense of its echoes in this nimble and expansive experiment in national and cultural inheritance. A collective of artists born after the end of Lebanon’s Mountain War of 1983 make various attempts at exhuming, representing, and understanding events that have nevertheless shaped their lives. Archival images are projected onto a modern dancer, artists discuss history and politics in deliberately performative tableaus, and a masked figure traverses the landscape accompanied by confessions from a propaganda photographer, who recounts the deadly staging of an image inspired by a Goya painting. Imprecision is the point and the power of Toni Geitani’s playful and haunting debut feature.