A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing by the ruins". The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring capitalist and colonial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, archives and ruins, histories of sex, and histories of empire, all commingle in this essay film. What transpires is a web of visible and invisible threads where homosexuality in the Middle East today seems to be enmeshe

The Ruins

While living abroad, a queer filmmaker occasionaly returns to his hometown of Tripoli, Lebanon. His quest to confront the city that once rejected him inspires reflections that give the film the character of an urban symphony.