The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures. “The image that inspired the film was that of a plant in the dark illuminated by a flashlight. I think there was something about the appearance and disappearance of the plant under the movement of the flashlight that captivated me. It was also an image that made me feel that something mysterious was about to happen. So I started making images of plants at night, plants that I found in the streets of Beirut. I took these images with my mobile phone. Little by little, I found myself collecting images of plants that I came across here and elsewhere, night and day. It became an obsession. I noticed the way they occupied the space. I had the impression that they were coming from somewhere else, that they weren’t part of the urban fabric of the city but were intruding on it. I grew up with the image of Beirut as a concrete city with no trees or plants. This is true, in the sense that there are no green spaces such as parks, gardens and woods. It’s true that concrete takes up a lot of space, but the flora exists, it’s just that it’s wild and not really organised. That’s all I could see in the city: trees, plants and flowers. This stubbornness created in my imagination the story of a hidden garden that would be the origin of the presence of plants in this concrete city.” (Nour Ouayda)
