Waltz with Bashir (Israel)

http://waltzwithbashir.com

[Ari] Folman's "Waltz With Bashir" is a remarkable, haunting and intense work, quite unlike any animated film I've ever seen. Hand drawn in a crude, colorful underground-comics style, it captures Folman's struggle to recapture his lost memories of what he saw and what he did during Israel's ill-fated 1980s war in Lebanon, when he was a young draftee. Folman says that for many years he had no clear memories of his time in Lebanon, although he knew he had seen combat and that he had witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacres of September 1982, when pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militiamen carried out a near-genocidal campaign of murder in two Palestinian refugee camps.

While trying to work his way out of a severe depression, Folman contacted many of his former military comrades, along with a psychiatrist friend and a neurologist who specializes in memory impairment. The film combines pieces of these interviews with fragmentary episodes drawn from these men's memories, dreams and perhaps fantasies, all of them (until the utterly devastating last scenes) delivered in the same animation style. At least in part, the subject of "Waltz With Bashir" -- the title refers to Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose assassination inflamed Lebanese Christians to widespread anti-Muslim violence -- is the unreliable and fantastic quality of memory itself. One friend's dream about being pursued by a pack of wild dogs seems just as real or unreal as another's eerie memory of a firefight in a remote orchard against a shadowy opponent -- a boy of 11 or 12, who blows up an Israeli tank with an RPG before being killed himself. (Folman was involved in this battle, but apparently still cannot remember it.)

Oddly, the adventure-comics presentation of Folman's memory excavation lends it less rather than more power. (As he has said, the alternative was to shoot a bunch of middle-aged men talking.) His resurrected war stories really are exciting adventures, but also terrible, nightmarish and finally pointless ones. Dredging up these dreadful memories may have been therapeutic for the men involved, but the point of "Waltz With Bashir" is bigger than that. It's a provocative, strange and arresting film, whose unusual blend of style and substance should reach a large worldwide audience.

Source: Salon

Under The Bombs a film by Philippe Aractingi

Under The Bombs a film by Philippe Aractingi




Observer

It's a wry, tragic road movie, shot in the war zone while the smell of cordite hung in the air and smoke still rose from shattered buildings. Revealing, occasionally darkly comic, Under the Bombs is raw, painfully vivid, full of sharp detail and extremely moving.



Guardian

...a heartfelt road movie, with lacerating images of Israel's recent war in Lebanon. Paradoxically, by appearing in a fiction feature, these images achieve a reality that is never fully conveyed in television news reporting. With remarkable resourcefulness, Aractingi has simply taken his actors, camera and crew into the destroyed landscape and partly improvised a heartwrenching film from what he has found there. Nada Abou Farhat plays Zeina, a haughty, wealthy and beautiful woman who arrives in Beirut from Dubai in the summer of 2006, after the Israeli Defence Force's catastrophically misjudged bombardment of southern Lebanon. Desperately, she begs for a taxi driver to take her to a village in the south, to discover what has happened there to her young son. The only person who agrees is Tony (Georges Khabbaz), who appears to be louche, unreliable, in it for the cash. But Zeina's desperate quest opens a long-buried wound in Tony: his relationship with a fugitive brother who, during the last war in 1982, joined the collaborationist South Lebanese Army. Zeina and Tony are the oddest of odd couples, and I suspect Aractingi was never entirely sure how much sexual tension there should really be between them. But these human nuances are not as important as the vision of Lebanon's extraordinary, almost surreal landscapes of destruction and hurt.



BBC

Shot without a formal script during the middle of Israel's 33-day bombardment and invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the poignant Under the Bombs is a heartfelt road movie from Lebanese writer-director Philippe Aractingi. It tracks a wealthy Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) and a Christian taxi driver Tony (Georges Khabbaz), who are travelling from Beirut to the devastated south of the country in search of Zeina's young son Karim and her sister.

Zeina and Tony make for an unlikely pairing, given their differences in class, religion and gender, and she initially sits in the back seat of his Mercedes and brushes aside his attempts at friendly conversation. When they reach the village of Kherbet Selem and discover that Zeina's family home is in ruins however, Tony vows to continue the search for Karim with his passenger, and she in turn reveals more about her own life.

About Farhat and Khabbaz are the only professional actors in Under the Bombs: all the supporting characters, whether they are refugees, soldiers, nuns, foreign journalists, Hezbollah supporters or aid workers, play themselves. Together with the news footage that's incorporated into the story, the casting gives the film a powerful authenticity. Aractingi isn't interested in political sermonising, but in showing the impact of this war on Lebanon's infrastructure and its civilian population. The film's credits are dedicated to "the suffering of the innocent", and the ending to Zeina's quest is appropriately wrenching.

http://www.underthebombs.com/

Flavia Codsi, Lebanon

No Fly Zone
















Jammal's Choice
































Les Dormeurs

Source: ArteEast

Lebanese Cartoon: "Turkey: Sweeping Victory For Erdogan's Party"

Source: Al-Mustaqbal, Lebanon, July 24, 2007

Caramel - سكر بنات, directed by Nadia Labaki

'Caramel' tells the story of five Lebanese women from different generations and religious backgrounds who meet in a Beirut beauty salon. They use the 'Caramel' in the title to wax their legs.

The feature film concentrates on the five women. Layal, played by Nadine Labaki, works in the beauty salon in Beirut along with three other women. Each one has a problem: Layal has an affair with a married man, Nisrine, a Christian is set to wed a Muslim, Rima is lesbian and Jamal frets about growing old.

==

Labaki describes the filmmaking process:

"The film came from personal questioning I have about Lebanese women [who] are an example of emancipation, of liberty, of independence for other regions in the Middle East. Lebanese women are really doing what they want in their lives. But at the same time, there is this struggle with their traditions, their religion, their education. It is still a little bit rigid. So it is a struggle between these two worlds.



"When you think about Beirut, normally you see a grey picture, you see smoke, you see buildings that are destroyed, you see women crying in the street. This is what comes to your mind when you see the word Beirut. And I wanted to change that. I wanted to make a film that was colorful and about warm people, because this is also our reality. I think I come from a generation that doesn't want to look back, that doesn't want to talk about war anymore. It wasn't easy in my case, because I finished the shoot and a week later the war broke out again. So I had a huge feeling of guilt. Why was I making a film about life when my country was at war? But then I thought maybe this was my way of struggling, of resisting: making films about life [in a time of war].

Sources: Blogging Beirut, Ya Libnan, Premiere

Ain al Hilweh Refugee Camp, Lebanon, 1983

Ein el-Hilweh is the largest Palestine refugee camp in Lebanon, both in area size and population. It is situated near the town of Saida 45 km south of Beirut. There are 45,337 registered Palestine refugees.

Source: UNRWA

Damaged Lebanese Refugee Camp, 1983
In the Ein Hilwe Refugee Camp, outside of Sidon, Lebanon, a car drives down a dusty street amid reconstruction of damaged buildings in the aftermath of an invasion by Israel.

U834109| RM| © Bettmann/CORBIS

Nahr al Barid Refugee Camp, 1952

http://www.palestineremembered.com