"Kan ya makan-There was and there was not" is how Arabic children's stories traditionally begin. In resisting the legitimacy of direct representation in relation to Lebanon, many recent films and videos intervene with symbols, dreams, memories, and imagination. The stories that unfold may be about the difficulty of telling stories, of making images of Lebanese experiences. Roula Haj-Ismail describes her I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside (1992, 13 mins): "The same way our bodies are socially constituted, scars, both inner and outer, define us°living in Beirut, a fragmented and divided city, my own internal fragmentation became more obvious to me." In Khidni, Fairouz: The Virtual Concert (1995, 5 mins, B&W), Amer Ghandour depicts "a dream I had of a concert for peace in Lebanon; Fairouz was singing with a rock band added to the soundtrack of Twin Peaks." Jalal Toufic's Ashoura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (1996, 17 mins) uses "images from the yearly Shiite ritual Ashoura commemorating the slaughter of the grandson of the prophet Mohammed in 680 (to try) to probe the function of preservation of the image at the beginning stages of the era of digital technology, the era of the loss of (generation) loss." In Gariné Torossian's Girl from Moush (1993, 6 mins, 16mm), fragmented film images are reframed, layered, literally cut into, to suggest an Armenia that is unknown to her, yet an inspiration. Tina Bastajian's Pinched Cheeks and Slurs in a Language That Avoids Her (1994, 11 mins) explores a young girl's "sense of belonging to and estrangement from a culture and a language that is both familiar and alien to her." Ara Madzounian's My Father on the Tree (1995, 4.5 mins) depicts a potent dream, while Mona Hatoum's Eyes Skinned (1988, 4 mins) recalls through images, news accounts, and performance the eradication of the Palestinian people. Akram Zaatari describes Pictures: Reflection (1995, 10 mins): "Light is a basic element of image making and a source of 'knowledge'; seeing is the first step in being informed. This idea of making images is introduced to children in the old city of Saida."-Kathy Geritz