In Search of Times Past
Directed, Produced, Shot, & Edited by Aya Chouaib.
Featuring Sultana Cheaib. Music by Mildred Dilling.
Film Festivals
Festival Selections:
Toronto Lift-off film festival
Women over 50 film festival
Lebanese film festival in Canada
Lebanese film festival of France
Lift-off online sessions
First-time filmmaker online sessions
Sunday Shorts Film Festival
Lacorne International Film Festival
Golden Shorts Film festival
Lebanese Independent Film Festival
Festival Awards:
Best Documentary - Sunday Shorts Film Festival (end of year round)
Award Winner - Lacorne International Film Festival
Semi-Finalist - Sunday Shorts Film Festival
Best Editing - Golden Shorts Film Festival
Commended Best Student Film - Women Over 50 Film Festival
“In Search of Times Past” is a reverie, a dreamscape that paints a poeticized portrait of the turbulent memories in a Lebanese woman’s life. 65 year-old Sultana unravels her life with you and recounts the lost memories of her youth in a war-torn country. Memory, image, and sound undulate on screen to create a synesthesia dreamscape that interweaves reality with reminiscence and the wistfulness of memory. The story is detached of the political, rather the intention of the piece is to connect the audience through a shared sense of oneness, tethering us through the universal emotions that unfold on screen, that anyone from any walk of life can relate to. This short experimental documentary invites the viewer to drift into the cognitive landscape of its beguiling subject, while simultaneously reflecting on our own histories as well. Love, passion, fear, trauma, grief and joy ~ These are the stories that unite us, the stories that must live on. The stories of our humanity.