Manoug manougian biography channel
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Film Review: ‘The Lebanese Rocket Society’
A forgotten chapter of Middle Eastern history is brought to light in docu &#;The Lebanese Rocket Society.&#; The pic&#;s first two-thirds, which trace the strange story of Lebanon&#;s aborted venture into the space race from , prove far more fascinating than the final half-hour, which follows helmers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige&#;s co-option of this peculiar history for their multimedia project. Still, bagging the $, prize for best docu at Doha Tribeca should help fuel &#;Rocket&#;s&#; ride to fests, cinematheques and broadcasters.
When the Beirut-born filmmakers discover an old photograph of a Lebanese rocket in flight, they are astonished to learn that their country was the first in the Middle East to launch a rocket. They set out to explore why the rocket program, once the pride of the nation, seems to have no place in Lebanon&#;s collective consciousness today.
In so doing, they adopt a subjective approach typical of their art-making, filtering the facts through their own voiceover theories about history and dreams. This slightly precious conceptualization won&#;t be to all tastes, although it brings in a broader sociological context, relating the end of rocket research to the failure of pan-
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Lebanon’s forgotten peripheral programme
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Photos from Manoug Manougian&#;s collection.
In the s, as the US and the USSR began a decades-long war of nerve-wracking almosts on the edge of space, a group of Lebanese scientists and engineers were quietly contemplating their own foray into the final frontier.
This “quiet contemplation” developed into the only thriving space program ever established in the Middle East. Then it disappeared entirely from collective memory. It’s as if an entire generation contracted selective amnesia between and —no one remembers the small nation&#;s ambitious stab at making it to space. That is, until two Lebanese filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, decided to remind the world of the effort. They recently produced a feature documentary that breathed life back into the Lebanese Rocket Society.
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They capture the moment when, in , while Lebanon was still reeling from the high of independence and Arabism still lingered in the cafes and publishing houses, Beirut’s Haigazian University began working on a project that would make Lebanon a serious player in the space race for the next seven years. The project was the brainchild of mathematics and physics professor Manoug Manougian, who, on an autumn day in put up a sign on the student bulletin board that read “