To discover one of the festival’s most interesting exhibitions, you have to climb the stairs and enter the Fann Wa Chai café-gallery, opened a year ago by Linda Al Khoury, founder of the nearby Maison des Photographes, and a partner of the festival. In this unpretentious organic café, the goldfish floating in a television set aquarium must feel closer than ever to the spiritual dimensions of this land where religion was born. On the walls are documents produced by the Dominican Friars and the White Fathers of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, dignified portraits from the early 20th century to the 1930s shot in places whose names today—Madaba, Damascus, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Bethlehem and Hebron—are mostly seen in headlines as the sites of tragic events. This unique photo library holds 20,000 glass plates dating from 1880 to 1935.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
