Artist and director Joana Hadjithomas was born in Beirut in 1969 and grew up during the Lebanese civil war. Since the 1990s, the artist has collaborated with Khalil Joreige, with whom she developed a work focused on creating formal and thematic relationships between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema, questioning the fabrication of images, and representations, the construction of imaginaries and the historical narrative.
The Lebanese duo has already made numerous films, including Ismyrna (2016); The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of The Lebanese Space Race (2012); Khiam 2000-2007 (2008); Je Veux Voir (2008), with Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué, which premiered in the Cannes Festival's official selection in 2008 and was awarded Best Single Film by the French Critics Guild; A Perfect Day (2005), awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival; The Lost Film (2003); and Around the Pink House (1999)(1999) and her latest film, Memory Box (2021).
Several retrospectives of their films have been presented at renowned institutions such as Cinematek (Brussels), Flaherty Seminar (New York), Institut Français and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Gijon International Film Festival (Spain), Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Lincoln Center (New York), Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland), MoMA (New York), Paris Cinema, Tate Modern (London), and Visions du réel (Nyon).