49 mins | Lebanon | Arabic/Eng. ST |2011

This film is a prologue to 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) and it’s also co-written and co-directed by Raed and Rania Rafei. Based on speculative improvisations, the film asks young political activists to imagine the day students in March 1974 occupied the office of the president of the American University of Beirut.

"The beauty of Prologue - which really is a prologue to a feature film that the directors hope to complete in the coming year - is that virtually all of the dialogue is improvised. The actors are young activists involved in Lebanon's anti-sectarian movement. In addition to reenacting a late twentieth-century event, they were asked to address themes of revolution and change, from their own twenty-first-century perspective, just as the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were gaining momentum. As such, Prologue blurs the lines between past and present, action and intention, experience, and ambition." Kaelen Wilson-Goldie for Bidoun.

Watch an excerpt from the film here.

Prologue was first screened at Ashkal Alwan's Video Works in 2011 in Beirut and was screened later in venues in New York and Italy. In 2021, Prologue was part of the Making Revolution exhibition in Montreal.