Agate mousse

A visit to a cosmetic-surgery clinic and the discovery of a lump in his testicle and an abscess in his mouth confront filmmaker Salim Mourad with transience and decay in this unashamedly navel-gazing film essay. ‘Salim from Beirut’ is the last in a long list of names of extinct species he recites during a loveless Grindr fuck.

After his death, which proceeds without any further explanation or ado, we see Salim’s image appear in an exhibition by a pretentious photographer. As he hangs nonchalantly on the gallery wall – looking like the love-child of Jean-Paul Belmondo and James Dean, complete with cigarette dangling from his lips – a visitor to the gallery comments that the round framing of these portraits of the dead is reminiscent of film. The actual film frame then also adopts this circular form, this time with Salim’s friend Tamara at the centre.

What follows is in many ways like a snake swallowing its own tail, with both maker and work constantly self-referencing; in the eternal cycle of birth and death this creates, Salim and Tamara finally become their own ancestors. The naked, queer body once again plays a prominent role in this concluding instalment of Mourad’s Linceul trilogy – preceded by the shorts Linceul (2017) and Cortex (2018). Using a combination of painterly images, form experimentation, mythical motifs and philosophical commentary, Agate mousse forms an aesthetic antidote to fear of The End.