Un Homme Perdu

Directed by Danielle Arbid. (2007 Lebanese).

Thomas Koyré, a French photographer, travels around the world in search of extreme experiences. He crosses paths with Wahid Saleh, a strange man with a failing memory.

Wahid Saleh vanished in Beirut on April 26, 1985. The Red Cross found him in Amman in May 2002 and took him back to his family. The previous 17 years of his life had been a total mystery, and should have remained that way. But his encounter with Michel Koyré, the French photographer, decided otherwise.

The Frenchman tried to probe the secret of Wahid, the man without memory, by reviving his past and making his life, a story.

A peculiar and passionate friendship will grow up between the two tortured men, along the secret and despicable Arabian roads.

Director's statement

Danielle Arbid writes:
"This is a film about the loss of identity that could find an echo in the work of the American writer William T. Vollmann, in the travel photos of Antoine d'Agata or in these words that Chantal Akerman quotes in her book Autoportrait:

'On approaching the Middle East, as Jabès says, one immediately comes up against the problem of the outsider and so of oneself, of hatred for the other and so for oneself, for the other in oneself.'