New Documentary Charts Etel Adnan's Life Through Mount Tamalpais

Mount Tamalpais rises like a central character in "Adnan being and time" (2026), the first feature film by Paris-based American director Marie Valentine Regan, which had its US debut at New York's Rockaway Film Festival earlier this month. The documentary was filmed during the last five years of the late artist and poet Etel Adnan's life, before she died on November 14, 2021, at age 96.

From the late 1970s to the early 2010s, Adnan lived in Sausalito, California, at the base of Mount Tamalpais, on the coast north of San Francisco. For over five decades she turned her attention to the mountain in numerous paintings and poems. As the film progresses, its sounds and landscapes stitch together a defining arc of Adnan's life and practice during her exile from Lebanon — a period she describes in the film as "a secret wish," or something that isn't all negative.

Regan, a friend of Adnan's, follows the artist through her Paris home, studio and gallery, sharing meals with friends. Adnan muses on the many facets of her life: facing history "head on" after a childhood spent in Beirut; how she "absorbed" the catastrophes witnessed by her Syrian father and Greek mother, including the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the 1922 burning of her mother's native "lost city" of Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey); maintaining a visual art practice "in Arabic"; and what it means to experience "being and time," central concerns of her art and writing.

The film draws on Adnan's 1986 book, "Journey to Mount Tamalpais." "For years I am going, coming back, turning around the mountain, getting up in the middle of the night to make sure it is still there, staring at it, walking all over it, and dreaming, dreaming," she writes, quoted in the film. "I am 'making' the mountain as people make a painting." When a journalist once asked who the most important person was she had ever met, Adnan recalls replying, "It's a mountain."

Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut. "I grew up around ambiguities, around problems" in French-controlled Lebanon, she says in the film. "The French nuns [at school] were selling to us French culture … not as an addition, but as a replacement—and that's a cultural crime. You become a foreigner in your own country."

Decades later, she addressed that "cultural crime" directly. In response to the Algerian War of Independence from French colonial rule (1954–62), Adnan famously stopped writing in French in solidarity, choosing instead to write in English and to paint in Arabic. In the film, she frames the dualities of her Arab American identity as complementary rather than conflicted. "My painting is the paradisiac side of the world, and my writing is the apocalyptic," she says.

The documentary shows Adnan at work: marking up pages in ink, scraping pigment onto canvases with a palette knife, creating simplified, color-rich forms drawn from nature and memory. "When I take a brush in black ink, and I draw the beginning of a tree, it's a feeling of doing an essential thing—doing something that gives me inner peace," she says.

During production, Adnan never returned to Mount Tamalpais. Once she turned 90, the health risks of a long-haul flight kept her in Paris. The camera instead follows her shuffling through her Paris apartment and visiting the French coast — never too far removed from her beloved peak.

On instinct and making, she is categorical. "We can't afford to ask ourselves too many questions; it stops us from working," she says while sketching potted flowers. Making art, she continues, "suspends ordinary thinking. Maybe another thinking takes over, but we call it instinct. You know, instinct is not dead. It's an inner movement; it's a form. It's pre-thinking thinking." In one sequence, she spontaneously draws trees that "surge" upward until a gangly forest appears.

Adnan left Lebanon as a young student for Paris, later completing advanced studies in philosophy at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. She made the San Francisco Bay Area her home base, living and teaching there for some 60 years. Long recognized as a poet, she found belated success as an abstract artist and master colorist after participating, at 87, in Documenta 13 in 2012. Major solo shows followed at the Serpentine Galleries and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (both 2016), the Centrum Paul Klee in Bern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (both 2018), and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2021).

Regan has threaded an entire life into 70 minutes, with Adnan's incisive, ever-generous way with words, philosophical wisdom, and artworks lovingly conveyed. Even devoted fans, the film suggests, will find her work a site of continuous discovery in language, both visual and written.

One gap stands out: Adnan's relationship with her life partner, artist and writer Simone Fattal, who published much of Adnan's poetry, is kept at a certain distance. It is gently referenced, and the two appear hosting meals and attending a book signing together. One of Fattal's raw ceramic sculptures of two figures, "The Meeting," suggests their own first encounter.

"What is a long relationship?" Regan said in an email. "It is so many things and part of the deep texture of their lives. But I've tried to weave that into this film so it is there, evoked and felt, but at the same time part of this larger portrait of Adnan."

Fattal, in a sense, has the last word. In a final scene, we learn that, just as Adnan wished, Fattal scattered her ashes on the hills of Mount Tamalpais.