My Heart Beats Only For

One of the most intriguing elements of Mohamed Soueid's film My Heart Beats Only For Her (2008) is the ambiguous narrative that lies somewhere between fiction and documentary. In this film a man named Hassan tries to retrace the steps of his father Hatem Hatem, a Lebanese revolutionary in the 1970s, on a journey from Beirut to Hanoi to Dubai. Soueid combines and interrelates these two seemingly opposite genres, creating a space for interpretation and growth. In particular, I am going to focus on the scenes where the colour red may point to the theatricality of the setting or the characters. These scenes to me are the " red flags " that bring to the surface and point out the limits of the two genres and show how, combined, they may be able to push forward the story and the issues raised by the filmmaker. I will relate Soueid's film to the work of Jean Rouch, an anthropologist and filmmaker who had a similar mandate of combining fiction with documentary. According to Paul Stoller in " Jean Rouch and the Power of the Between, " " the between is a central concept in Moroccan mystical thinking " (134). Stoller refers to Moulay Abedaslem's description of the between as barzakh, " what lies between things – edges, borders, and events " (134). This gap is associated with sleep and dreaming, used commonly in the expression " little death " for sleep. The word barzakh is mentioned in the Koran, meaning the great separator. The notion of the between also has deep roots in Sufi thought. According to Stoller, Ibn al-'Arabi, the Andalusian Sufi, says: " Any two adjacent things are in need of barzakh which is neither one nor the other, but which possesses the power … of both." While the between can generate fear and anxiety, it can also guide one's experience and bring up questions. In the world of filmmaking,