Ali Cherri

Ali Cherri (1976, Lebanon) is a Beirut-born filmmaker and sculptor based in Paris. His work is exhibited in major museums around the world. In 2022, he was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Art Biennale. The same year, his first feature film, Le Barrage, was presented at Cannes as part of the Quinzaine des cinéastes. He then directed the short films Le Guetteur, selected for the Rotterdam Festival in 2024, and La Sentinelle, presented at the Cannes Critics’ Week in 2026.

The residency at Villa Medici is part of a research project on the figure of the soldier, the body on alert and contemporary surveillance regimes, developed through a trilogy combining cinema, sculpture and drawing. After The Watchman and La Sentinelle, this project is the third part. The film follows a Lebanese soldier wounded on the Lebanese-Syrian border, whose convalescence at his mother’s house shifts the military narrative to the domestic space, where war operates on a different scale. The residency will enable us to continue writing the film and to refine its visual and sound form.