Not All Things That Shine Are Beautiful
2022 · 6m · Lebanon
Directed by Nour Ouayda
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, sensual
A walk toward Beirut's seaside, the camera fixed on the city's texture, light, and colors, zooming in on mundane details as if unable to see the city whole.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is just... a camera walking around Beirut looking at pretty things? Where's the subversion, the formal rupture, the premise that makes you *gasp*? It's too pleased with its own melancholy to actually risk anything.
Ouayda's refusal to synthesize the city into a coherent whole—staying instead with texture, light, mundane detail—is a deliberate formal stance that recalls the essay film tradition of Harun Farocki and later Safdie, a measured argument about fragmented perception that unfolds through compositional restraint.
The fixed camera is the masterstroke here—by refusing to pan or hunt for the cityscape money shot, Ouayda forces us into an almost claustrophobic intimacy with surfaces, and that constraint transforms what could've been a travel video into something genuinely disorienting about how we actually see places we're supposed to understand.