Reine Chahine is a documentary filmmaker, photographer, and editor focused on human-centered storytelling. She holds a Master’s degree in Documentary Filmmaking, which informs her research-driven and story-focused approach to visual storytelling. Driven by curiosity and a strong interest in understanding people and their experiences, her work explores personal stories, social relationships, and the forces that shape our lives. Through her work, she seeks to experience and convey people’s stories and emotions, exploring what it means to be human.
Forced Coexistence
In Beirut, collapse isn’t just a sudden event anymore; it’s the environment we live in – a state of forced coexistence and dependency. Conceptualized as a video essay, this project connects directly to the exhibition’s theme Unparallel, by examining how public failure and private domestic life coexist until they inevitably collide. In Beirut, public services and private survival have operated on parallel tracks for decades due to deep-rooted corruption – not just with electricity, but across water, internet, and basic utilities. As state systems collapsed, private substitutes stepped in to run right alongside them. In my own apartment, I look directly out my window at a massive neighborhood generator sitting right on top of a gas station. It’s become my closest neighbor, a monster that doesn’t move because we’ve all built our daily routines around it – a constant presence right outside my glass, blurring the line between public infrastructure and my most private, intimate space.
The work didn’t start with the machine itself, but with the quiet realization that collapse has just become background noise: the normalization of the abnormal. In Beirut, the generator sits in a weirdly frustrating space. You hate it, depend on it, pay for it, and can’t get rid of it. It keeps your food cold while reminding you every single second that the state can’t provide basic electricity. It’s infrastructure, a financial burden, a daily soundtrack, and a mental weight all at once – neither pure oppression nor liberation, but a sign of a life where getting by means constantly relying on private workarounds.
The work also pushes back against the persistent myth of “resilience” – a buzzword that gets tossed around the region that wrongly suggests people are recovering from a crisis. What’s actually happening is perpetual adaptation. People are reorganizing their whole lives around a breakdown that never ends, simply because adapting replaced actually fixing the problem. The generator stops feeling like a piece of machinery and starts feeling like an immovable neighbor with more power than anyone living on the block, almost living with us.
At its core, the piece moves past standard political commentary to ask a much quieter, human question: What happens to us when we become intimate with conditions we were never supposed to live with long-term? How do we live every day with the very thing that wears us down? By framing the generator as both a landscape and a roommate, the video essay explores how living alongside failure changes our idea of what’s normal, shifting the question from How did we get here? to What has living like this done to us?