Yasmine and Leila discover the city through the archive of Farouk, a cinema owner surviving in between his film reels. Two friends take a journey, where they become protagonists of their own film, becoming inseparable from Beirut's cinematographic past. Known with her avant-garde documentaries, capturing the destruction, displacement and decadence of a geography, Saab puts the city to the main role, using space and architecture leading elements, utilising the power of cinema as a history making tool, as Thomas Elsaesser frames. 

Moving between periods and genres, it perfectly intertwines many spaces, characters and moods of this city, transforming façades into protagonists and moving images as an archive of emotions of belonging and mourning, while making the division between fiction and documentary less and less. A multiplex of cinematographic history by legendary Jocelyne Saab, an homage to Beirut where the war is not a rupture but a state of continuum.

In the heart of Europe: an apartment without a door lock. It is the domain of Coz, who now lives in Switzerland after fleeing Turkey. In this portrait, he tells his story. Of being locked up, of being excluded, and of how the doors and locks in his mind have lost their meaning.

“Coz” is the nickname of Yusuf Bayraktar. The filmmaker and his protagonist met many years ago while Bayraktar was studying physics at Istanbul University. Coz was sentenced to 13 years in prison at the time for participating in a peaceful demonstration against Turkish higher education policy. Since 2009, he has been living in Basel on political asylum, where he keeps his head above water with odd jobs and social welfare and dreams a lot. With his film, Büyükcoşkun shows a fate that is not an individual one.