24° TORINO FILM FESTIVAL

Le dernier homme

The Last man

Country: France
Year: 2006
Duration: 101'


Every day Beirut awakes to a new victim of what seems to be a serial killer. At the city hospital, Khalil, a doctor in his forties, sees the corpses arrive. Strange psychic and bodily symptoms gradually begin to disturb him. Over the course of events, he sinks into anxiety and solitude, and this malaise suggests some kind of connection with the appalling murders.

“Khalil is perhaps a metaphor for Beirut, but he is above all a product of the city. Beirut is a mutant city; it has given birth to a mutant. Beneath the blanket of social order, every great city hides its monsters as best as it can; these monsters don’t all necessarily live hidden in the shadows. A mutant doesn’t necessarily know that he’s a mutant. The fact that the social order has been upturned more than once in Beirut’s recent history facilitates the emergence of all sorts of mutants. I have borrowed from the vampire myth of the man who is neither truly alive, nor truly dead: he is ‘undead.’ A sort of ghost. And, in Beirut, there are a lot of ghosts.” (G. Salhab)

Biography

film director

Ghassan Salhab

Ghassan Salhab (Dakar, Senegal, 1958) spent his childhood in Senegal before moving to the Lebanon with his family in 1970. Five years later he went to study in Paris, after which he returned to Beirut. He teaches at the Lebanese Fine Arts Academy and the Université Saint Esprit in Kaslik, Lebanon. He has also written many articles for magazines specializing in art and Arab literature and worked for cinema as a screenwriter. He then directed short and middle length films. Le Dernier homme is his third full length feature, after the debut with Beirut fantôme (1998).

FILMOGRAFIA

Après la mort (cm, 1991), Beirut fantôme (1998), La Rose de personne (cm, 1998), De la séduction (mm, 1999), Baalbech (mm, 2000), Terra incognita (2002), Le Dernier homme (2006)

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