Fresh Air 1932 [in development]

Fresh Air 1932 follows Mona and Hana, a queer couple retreating to the French countryside, where their fragile intimacy unravels as they become submerged in the haunting voices and histories of womenconfined in Asfuriyeh, Lebanon’s 'Hospital for the Insane' in the 1930s.

Over a long weekend in rural France, Mona, a Franco-Lebanese composer, and Hana, her British-Tunisianpartner, retreat to Mona’s stepfather’s house to “get some air.” While Mona tends to the domestic setup: gathering firewood, lighting the boiler, Hana moves through small town errands with muted unease, strugglingwith her fading sense of self. Their silences deepen. Their bodies drift. As Mona rehearses for an upcoming Opera based on the Lebanese writer May Ziadé, institutionalised in the 1930s, her research seeps into the space: the voices of women once confined at Asfuriyeh Psychiatric Hospital. They become part of the couple's shared listening and begin to echo as archival audio, fragments, whispers. Soon the line between the erotic and the historical begins to blur. Hana becomes transfixed. She narrates fantasies aloud, a private game between them that begins to mutate. The couple’s intimacy flickers: a clementine peeled with four hands, breath meeting breath in the quiet kitchen, bodies pressing back toward life. But the cracks remain. Hana’s depression lingers like pollen: invisible but suffocating.

Interweaving fiction, oral histories, and a visual language inspired by archives. The film is a hybrid meditation on queer desire, displacement, mental illness, and the speculative power of archives. A chamber-piece of two women trying, failing, and maybe briefly touching something real.