Tales of the Purple House

From her house in the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanese painter Nour Ballouk works and watches the days go by; Lebanon and the entire planet is in turmoil, but in the everyday there is always room for beauty. Behind the camera, invisible but always present, Abbas Fahdel —her husband— observes and accompanies her. Tales of the Purple House is, among other things, a quiet dialogue between two artists who know that framing the world —from a canvas, from a camera or from a window— is what allows us to reflect on it. As in his extraordinary Homeland (Iraq Year Zero), the personal and the political are, to Fahdel, absolutely inseparable. Shot over the course of the past two years, Tales of the Purple House is a powerful statement on images as both refuge and political answer, and cinema as a means to save the world from self-destruction