Set against the background of the Covid-19 lockdown in Lebanon, The Diary of a Sky, the new film by Turner Prize-winning sound artist and filmmaker Lawrence Abu Hamdan, investigates airspace violations by the Israeli military through the sonic evidence of these flights’ ominous droning hums. Despite air travel grinding to a halt amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, in Beirut, continuous flights by the Israeli military punctured daily life in the city – weaponising the airspace and causing an ever-foreboding sense of nearby devastation to seep into the everyday lives of those on ground level. This 45-minute video essay chronicles this period of Beirut, bearing witness to hundreds of hours of airspace violations to draw links between territoriality and atmospheric violence, while considering the impact of these sonic aberrations on the Lebanese people.

(Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45 min, 2024)

Arabic spoken, English subtitles