ADNAN BEING AND TIME

Director: Marie Valentine Regan
Duration: 70 mins
Year: 2025
Subtitles
Documentary

This expressionistic portrait of the great Etel Adnan (b. Beirut, 1925) documents the artist and poet over the last five years of her life. Adnan is working without ego, asking, what does it mean to be alive, to live through catastrophe, to experience time?Close to Adnan in her daily life, in her studio, in her works, and in the natural world essential to her aesthetic and philosophic understanding, the film’s form creates an experience of Adnan’s radical quality of attention.

Born and raised in Beirut, Adnan was educated in French schools in Lebanon. She came to Paris to study philosophy and aesthetics at the Sorbonne, later doing advanced work in philosophy at Harvard University and UC Berkeley. In California, during the Algerian War for Independence, Adnan stopped writing in French and turned to English for her anti-war poetry. She also began to paint, creating abstract works in vivid colour, ink drawings, tapestries and accordion-folded paper books.

In 2012, at the age of 87, Adnan surged to increased international art world attention when she was ‘discovered’ by dOCUMENTA (13). Since then, Adnan’s work has received major solo shows at the Guggenheim, Serpentine Galleries, SFMOMA, Mass Moca, among many others.