A documentary that explores the construction of a structure, in the 1960s, designed by the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer in Tripoli, Lebanon. A project that is seen with ambiguity by the locals and that is “explained” by a fictional audio recording of the architect.
In the early 1960s, the architect Oscar Niemeyer was invited to design the Tripoli International Fair, a project that combined his modernist style of curves in reinforced concrete, inspired, according to him, by the female figure, with the specific context of the Arab Near East. When civil war broke out in the country in 1975, the project was suspended and remains to this day an abandoned site, an extraordinary white elephant at the gates of Lebanon’s second largest city. The film follows a cyclist as he rides through the labyrinthine streets surrounding the enormous abandoned exhibition space. While the streets of the neighborhood vibrate with the various activities of its people, next door, in a place of enormous architectural value, hardly anyone passes by. In both places you can hear the voices of those who have a say in the project and its (un)usefulness, and you can hear a fictional Niemeyer, who, on a train journey between Tripoli and Paris, spoke at length about his relationship with structures, the society that surrounds them, and power. (Margarida Moz)
