Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

“Aida, Save Me” (2009)

This lecture-performance is inspired by an extraordinary experience that took place during the 2006 Beirut premiere of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s film “A Perfect Day”, when Aida –the protagonist of the lecture– recognized in a fake newspaper clip made for the film to announce a missing person, the image of Antoine, her previous husband. “Antoine was looking at me and saying: ‘Aida, save me. I don’t know what I’m doing in this film, save me!’ ”, Aida told the filmmakers. From this moment, they got involved in a series of eerie coincidences: the fictive date they chose for Antoine’s disappearance met the anniversary of his marriage with Aida, his assassination while the film was still screened in Lebanon... all kind of incidents jeopardizing the career of the film in their homeland. Moreover, Aida decided to sue them, until they managed to reach a compromise when they agreed to cut Antoine’s image for Lebanon’s screenings. “Beyond this territory, he could remain a character, and she was able to put up with the fiction”, Hadjithomas said. “Aida, Save Me” tells a story that measures the distance between recognition and representation of oneself, and recounts an adventure wherein fiction suddenly takes on documentation.