Grandma, a Thousand Times (2011)

• 83%
• 2011
• Documentary
• Family
• Mahmoud Kaabour

A poetic documentary that puts a feisty Beiruti grandmother at the center of brave film exercises designed to commemorate her many worlds before they are erased by the passage of time and her eventual death. With great intimacy, the film documents the larger-than-life character Teta Fatima as she struggles to cope with the silence of her once-buzzing house and imagines what awaits her beyond death. Meanwhile, the features of her beloved violinist husband (deceased 20 years) manifest through the face of their filmmaker grandson while his previously unpublished violin improvisations weave through her world and that of the film. It brings together grandfather, grandmother and grandson in a magic-realist documentary that aims to defy a past death and a future one.