23 Kilometres

On the Damascus Road in Lebanon's beautiful Bekka Valley, an Armenian man with late-stage Parkinson's takes one last journey. This impressionistic documentary is a journey into the mind and life of a man with a crippling disease. In addition to the tremors and shakes, Barkev suffers from the lesser known 'monster' of Parkinson's, the relentless hallucinations that swing him back and forth between time and space. A machine maker and an amateur cosmologist, Barkev can no longer speak. Yet through his journals, his machines, and powerful imagery with music, the film travels both physically and metaphorically into the past and the future of both the man and his country Lebanon, a country debilitated by sectarian division not unlike Barkev's Parkinson's diseased body, left a shell of its former self by war, dwelling on the past, unable to imagine its own future.