Perhaps I Will Find Something in the Fog of Erasure

Cindy Chehab

synopsis

lenght

10 min

year

2026

university

IADT - Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland

technical info

Documentary film

Perhaps I Will Find Something in the Fog of Erasure explores the possibility of reconstructing a history which has been partially erased. The project originates from a single photograph salvaged from the artist’s mother’s archive, the only image to survive after the loss of all family belongings during the 1983 genocide in the Chouf villages of Lebanon.

Moving between personal confrontation and speculative reconstruction, the work traces fragments of memory, absence, and archival gaps. Drawing on home movies filmed by tourists in Deir El Qamar, where Chehab’s mother sought refuge, the film reassembles displaced histories into a fragmented documentary form.

Cindy Chehab is a Lebanese filmmaker and film programmer whose work focuses on the identity of the SWANA region. Through a research-based ethno-biographical film practice, she explores the intimate and political intersections of personal and collective memory. She interrogates the notion of the “absent archive” and the mechanisms of erasure, questioning how what is missing, suppressed, or fragmented can still structure memory, history, and image-making. She currently works as an archive researcher and producer on different documentary projects across Europe. In 2022, she co-founded a film and image culture space in Nicosia, Cyprus, a film club dedicated to critical engagement with film culture. Her curatorial interests center on militant and underrepresented documentary films. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Film Preservation and Archival Practices between Brussels, Lisbon, and Dublin as part of the first edition of the FilmMemory program.