Tripoli emphasizes political history and architectural traces through the preserved relics of our recent past. North Lebanon holds the remains of one of the world's most distinctive and ambitious construction projects, an international market place designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1966. An unfinished project abandoned at the outbreak of civil war in 1975. The modernist ruins are also a monument to a vanished optimism in the Middle East, and set the scene for a film that moves through phases of action and apathy, where fatigue seems to derive from the location itself. The film is part architectural documentary and part theatrical drama.