Ways of Listening: An Interview with Sound Designer Rana Eid

Abstract

This article is an interview between sound designer Rana Eid and film scholar Shohini Chaudhuri. It explores Eid’s personal and professional journey into sound and her work on MENA and international film soundtracks, highlighting the ethical, political and artistic dimensions of sound design in cinematic storytelling. Eid explains the different roles and elements of audio post-production, her preferred working practices and the different challenges of working on Lebanese, Arab and international films. Together, Eid and Chaudhuri discuss the ethics and aesthetics of sound design in fiction and documentary, and the importance of attentive listening to our environment and to each other. The discussion is illustrated with examples from the extensive portfolio of fiction feature films, feature documentaries, shorts and TV mini-series that Eid has worked on, as well as her own documentary, Panoptic (2017).