The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins

A film about sleeping and dying. First, we see how a man in a tearoom falls asleep while others go on talking, laughing and playing cards. Then, a series of close-ups of sleeping people – including director Jalal Toufic himself. A face, a hand, hair. Despite the stillness, it is obvious that they are alive. Their breathing makes an arm go up and down and their eyes move behind the eyelids. Next, an inserted title reads ‘3 a.m., July 1, 2003’. The camera is now in a slaughterhouse, where a bull is lying on the floor in convulsions, one leg pulled up by a chain and its throat cut. Blood pours across the white tiles and drains away into gutters. Subsequently, butchers routinely cut the throats of another bull and two sheep. Toufic films the half-severed, still writhing bull’s head with the same serenity as the sleeping people. For minutes, until the bull stops moving. Its skin is removed, the animal becomes meat. Chopped up, swinging from chains. At the end, a woman reads from Hoda Barakat’s book, The Stone of Laughter, in which a wounded man is in a similar position as the slaughterhouse animals.