As Israeli troops mass in southern Lebanon, Mohamed El-Assyouti revisits Arab Lutfi's documentary on Sidon, the filmmaker's elegy to the city of her youth, a place where the future and the past seem identical Lebanese filmmaker Arab Lutfi believes that "the people of Lebanon stand united behind the banner of Hizbullah which is defending the country against clear Israeli aggression, the main purpose of which is to implement the American project for a new Middle East divided along sectarian lines". In the past few days her native city of Sidon has offered shelter to many of the estimated one million Lebanese displaced by the conflict, a role it played in 1948 for the Palestinians and many times since for the Lebanese. In 1982 Israel's first military strike against Sidon resulted in 5,000 deaths. Lutfi regrets that entire generations have never known peace; surrounded by murder and imminent military attacks they live in constant fear. That Sidon is a "democratic" city, tolerant of cultural diversity, is a recurrent motif in Lutfi's documentary film Bawabat Al-Fuqa (The Upper or Southern Gate, 1991), a personal account of the city. Its people are Lebanese, but with a history of Palestinian and Syrian affinities and sympathy. When the French separated Sidon from Syria in the 1930s, political activist Hassib Said Al-Bizri reminisces at the beginning of Lutfi's documentary, the people were infuriated at what they considered a severance from their homeland. Al-Bizri went on to work with his older brother in supporting the Palestinian resistance and providing them with guns. Another political activist remarks towards the end of the film that thanks to the Israeli military invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s Sidon's pluralistic society became fractured and sectarian divisions between Shia, Sunni, Druze and Maronite emerged. Lutfi was born and raised in Sidon and witnessed the city's intense political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. She left in the 1970s to study filmmaking in Beirut and Cairo, returning between 1978 and 1982 and later, after the Israeli invasion, she was a frequent visitor to her native city. In her film she tries to reconstruct her own memories of the place, offering accounts of herself, her sister Maha and her friends, interspersing them with newspaper clips to illustrate her preoccupations and concerns in relation to Sidon at different times. "Palestinians and Lebanese form the population of Sidon since there was no border separating it from Acre in the north of Palestine until after 1948. Lebanese peasants and Palestinian refugees in the Ein Al-Helwa camp lived side by side. At least half of Sidon's families are mixed Lebanese and Palestinian. It became a centre of political struggle, almost a capital of the Lebanese south," Lutfi told Al-Ahram Weekly. One of the Palestinians interviewed in the film recalls his childhood. Forced out from Acre in Palestine by Israeli forces in 1948, Palestinians like him believed that their displacement would last for a matter of days. It was only when the truck he was riding was stopped by a group of young people who offered them food that it dawned on him that he was now a refugee. Ein Al-Helwa, where some French military barracks remained standing, became the site of Sidon's Palestinian refugee camp. Humanitarian organisations like UNRWA eventually offered tents and then cement and 50 Lebanese liras to each refugee to build a room, though thousands of Palestinians refused this "settlement". When in 1969 the Lebanese police cordoned off the camp to prevent protests from moving into Sidon's streets the people of the town marched into the camp to demonstrate with the Palestinians and a violent confrontation with police forces ensued. Sidon was clearly strongly supportive of the Palestinians which put it on a collision course with Israel when the latter invaded Lebanon. Lutfi's lyrical commentary which accompanies images of the town emphasises how the streets, buildings and the public places she knew in her youth have all been irrevocably marked by the Israeli invasion. "I was worried for the first time in my life when the [Israeli 1982] invasion took place. I felt I had lost the only place to which I belonged," narrates Lutfi. Later she adds that even Sidon's people have been affected in ways that cannot now be undone: "Lots of people gone and places changed. Anxiety is still there." For Lutfi the old city, with its political and social sites, the bourse, the cinemas, the moulids, has been lost and cannot now be retrieved outside the sphere of personal reminiscence. She regrets especially the loss of so many friends. In Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Robert Fisk writes about a visit to Sidon in the aftermath of the Israeli air raids in June 1982. "So many hundreds of civilians were killed by the Israeli air raids on Sidon that the local Red Cross had not yet had time to bury all the dead. So at the little elementary school off the Jezzine road, they had sprinkled the corpses with a powder of lime, a benevolent white dust that somehow softened this evil place, turning the bodies of the men, women and children into statues, like the carbonised residents of ancient Pompeii when the ash of Vesuvius fell upon them." This elementary school bombing occupies centre stage in Lutfi's documentary. An interviewee who, along with others, had to help bury around 1000 corpses, many unidentifiable, remembers that 120 corpses of mostly women and children who had taken shelter in the cellar of the school were left unburied in the heat for about 11 days. A certain Sheikh sent him a message demanding that the men should be buried separately from the women; his angry response was "let him come do this job himself". About half the corpses were transferred into a mass grave in Maqbarit Al-Shuhadaa (The Martyrs' Graveyard) while those remaining were buried in the playground of the school, which was later covered in concrete. It was impossible, says the interviewee, to separate Muslim from Christian, man from woman from child, so badly had the bodies been burned and mutilated. Sidon was also the backdrop for an unfolding love affair between a Christian and a Muslim. Palestinian resistance activist Nicola Mansour and Ilham had a relationship for seven years; their families objected to their marriage and they lived mostly separately though they had children together. He lived in Tyre and she in Sidon until he was killed during the Israeli invasion. Though Sidon's inhabitants were mobilised to protest on a number of issues -- including the workers' strike against the French Regie tobacco company and the fishermen's demonstrations against the monopoly of the Protein Company -- it was the Palestinian cause that always occupied them most, as when Father Gregoire Haddad announced that sectarian differences should be put aside and Christian integration into an Arab pro-Palestinian position be given highest priority. Sidon's fishermen, peasants, workers, refugees, resistance fighters, political activists and students all share a common fate and the memories of loved ones lost to Israeli shelling will accompany them to the end of their days. The living and the dead, Christian and Muslim, Palestinian and Lebanese, Syrian and Arab, seem to blend, sometimes separating but at other times merging into one in the melting pot of Sidon. Throughout its history -- from French occupation to Israeli invasion -- the city has witnessed many transformations. Lutfi's account recalls a city in which her political consciousness, and the beginnings of her love for cinema, were forged. It is a city that has changed forever.
