Educational Media Reviews Online

This film is unique in that it is an inward look at a war fought in one nation. It’s a look at people’s psyche and their attitude towards war, not against an enemy, but their own. Arbid’s documentary makes some powerful statements about the after math of the Lebanese Civil War that took place between 1975 and 1990. It wasn’t long ago that “everyone wanted to kill everyone”, as she states in the opening of her film, yet no one seems to remember. Danielle Arbid was born in 1970 and fled this war in 1980s to France where she studied journalism. She worked the French press for six years before directing her first critically acclaimed film Radim (Demolition) about a woman who searches for her house in pictures of Beirut ruins, followed by Le passeur (the passerby) about a Kirdish refugee in Paris. This is her first documentary and, it won two Best Documentary awards in 2000 and 2001 consecutively (see below).

In this film, Arbid takes us along her quest to remember the war that drove her out of her home. Instead she is left with more questions than answers. The ruins have become tourist attractions, and there are no memorials to tell the story. Children and adults don’t seem to have a reason to remember. In an interview of children playing in the grounds of a refugee camp, they talk about finding a dead body, with chilling causality. Later, she surveys adults who might have lived or witnessed the war. Invariably they repress the issue from their memory, from their conversations. This is not surprising considering that Lebanon is a fairly young country. Lessons from war have not had time to sink in. The new generation of leaders is hell-bent on renewing the country. This is perhaps best demonstrated in Amiralay’s film L’Homme aux semelles d’or (The Man with the Golden Soles), Audiovisual Multimedia International Production, France, which tells the story of Rafiq al-Hariri, prime minister and his centrifugal goal of reconstructing Beirut, erasing traces of war.

But was the war really forgotten? While it may seem that way, odds are that it is not. Not by a long shot. The director ends her film with a scene of her father showing her his gun, hidden under his pillow. Almost 150,000 dead and the only memories are preserved in ruins, photographs, and the hearts of those left behind. For them, the civil war is very personal, not worth mentioning, much less remembering. Only war against the enemy (Israel) would merit a monument, as a parliamentary deputy responds when she asks if there’ll ever be a memorial to the civil war.

Beautifully edited, with high quality audio and video, this film is suitable for a public library, or college library with a program in Middle Eastern studies. The film can be used to provide a cultural perspective on the war mentality of that region.

Awards: Best Documentary, 2001 Seattle Human Rights Film Festival; Silver Leopard, 2000 Locarno Film Festival