Mohamed El-Assyouti reviews a string of screenings that look war in the face Is the Lebanese (1975-1990) really over? This is a question that filmmaker Mohamed Soueid asks in his documentary Harb Ahliya (, 2002), a 85-minute film investigating the sudden death -- or was it suicide? -- of Soueid's collaborator, assistant, cameraman and friend Mohamed Dou'aibas, who also worked with Akram Zaatari and other Lebanese independent filmmakers. Through the tragedy of this artist, Soueid hints at the disappointments and frustrations of Lebanese society at large -- its ongoing failure to recover from the war, a war that Dou'aibas himself believed would never be over, since its root causes remain intrinsic to Lebanese society: a schizophrenia oscillating between Arab and Western, Muslim and Christian identities. Dou'aibas's identification papers and clothes were found in a deserted building destroyed in the war and his body, had fallen from its ninth floor -- the police could not determine whether he was pushed. Dou'aibas believed that the primal drive of the war was sexual frustration, which manifested in aggression, and that the persistence of this frustration is extremely alarming -- something Soueid's camera illustrates, by showing the contradictions rampant in women's relationships to their bodies: the way they dress, walk on the street, their modes of self expression, especially vis-�-vis men. Female lingerie shop windows display underwear with military fatigues' patterns, which are also printed on tight pants that girls parade in on the sidewalks, and on the sexy outfits pop singers dance with on stage on Army Day. The violence of the war, Soueid seems to stress, scared the Lebanese psyche beyond redemption. Soueid connects the mysterious death of Dou'aibas, this lover of popular and especially Egyptian films, with both the death of Egyptian screen idol Souad Hosni, believed to have committed suicide by throwing herself out of a London apartment building, and the 9/11 bombings. Superficial as the comparison may seem -- Dou'aibas, Hosni and the 9/11 terrorists and victims, all died of free fall, whether voluntarily or not -- it implies that the state of despair incumbent upon social and political repression is threatening to induce not only the death of individuals but an all-out war, both inside the psyche and out. Ironically, during the elapsing week three bombs exploded in Beirut, on the heels of Rafiq Al-Hariri's assassination, bringing Lebanon closer to the brink of another civil war, while Cairo witnessed chaotic displays of public sentiment, revealing a blend of sexual and political frustration -- right before and during the funeral of screen legend Ahmed Zaki, a kind of male equivalent of Hosni. Indeed, the Cairo screenings of Soueid's 2002 film could not have been better timed. In Harb Ahliya, Soueid toys with an investigative narrative structure, inserting an episode in which a woman speaks of her frustrations with men and society, pointing out that her hysteria is well justified -- in a single very long take. Dou'aibas's friends say he refused to marry, smoked five cigarette packets daily, and his teeth were a constant source of anxiety. Dou'aibas obsessive-compulsively frequented his dentist, who argues that the stress of the trauma of war has been transported into the mouth, weakening the teeth. Soueid also visits fellow filmmaker Akram Zaatari, who is also making a film on Dou'aibas, showing him as a karate and samurai film fan who imitates the movements of the heroes. Likewise filmmaker Ghassan Salhab dedicates an unused scene from a film he was working on to Dou'aibas -- a character who assimilated and internalised the melancholy of civil war -- while Soueid's camera and soundtrack investigate the individual and collective trauma his death epitomises. The problem of Palestine is as persistent as the war in the work of both Soueid and Zaatari, both of whom have been politically active. In the latter's Al-Yom (This Day, 2003), numerous photos of daily Israeli atrocities committed against the Palestinians are visual testimonies scattered in cyber space which do not raise an eyebrow in the international community; an imagined television advertisement shows a Jewish child asking his father whether the holy book excepted Palestinian land from the commandment "Do not steal"; in 1970 archival photos of Palestinian members of Fattah, their beards grown in mourning for the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, a symbol of anti-Israeli Arab unity. Soueid's Indama Yaati Al-Massa (Nightfall, 2000), on the other hand, follows the fate of the so called "the students squad" -- a Lebanese branch of Fattah, who felt abandoned in the early 1980s when the Palestinian movement was evicted from Lebanon upon the heels of the Israeli invasion. One member cries bitterly when Nasser dies, while his father names his newborn daughter Gamal -- a male name -- fulfilling a pledge he has made to give his baby the Egyptian president's name, be it male or female. Over an 11-month period, the film follows the daily life of the group's survivors, some of whom meet nightly to drink and share memories of activism and lost comrades, reciting poetry in praise of alcohol and women, while others -- novelist Elias Khoury, for example, editor-in-chief of the magazine Shioun Falastiniya (Palestinian Affairs) -- have gone on to become prominent literary figures. (Both Khoury and Soueid co-scripted with Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah the latter's version of Khoury's epic novel about the Palestinian struggle Bab Al-Shams -- "Gate of the Sun"). Soueid agrees with Nasrallah that by the time his search for his roots ends, Khalil, Bab Al-Shams 's protagonist, has been thoroughly castrated, observing that paragons of resistance movements like "the students squad" tend to meet that fate; they are more at peace with their feminine side. On the sound track of Indama, covers of several nationalist and romantic classics, notably of Sayed Darwish, are performed by a female singer, and a female voice supplies the voiceover for the film straight out of Soueid's diaries. Similarly, Zaatari's own personal life supplies his films with their narrative backbone: in Al-Yom Zaatari reads from his early 1980s diaries, in which accounts of following or missing film screenings of classics like Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast, 1938), based on Emile Zola's novel, or Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie (The War is Over, 1966), or else Sydney Lumet's Serpico (1973), as well as contemporary releases like Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon (1981) and Pink Floyd's The Wall (1982), are interspersed with news of the Egyptian- Israeli peace treaty and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Aside from the diaries, Al-Yom looks through fragments of old photographs from 1950 onwards, some Orientalist images of Bedouin men and women, camels and a broken Jeep, comparing these with images of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan today, and in so doing suggesting the absence of any memory of this seemingly remote past in an urban cityscape of cars, streets, tunnels and apartment buildings. In Zaatari's Fi Haza Al-Bayt (In This House, 2004), on the other hand, a very minimalist visual structure -- two simultaneous display frames -- juxtaposes an interview with an action: a former militiaman recounts his civil war exploits in a white house at a crossroads, while a worker digs in its garden searching for a letter the militiaman had buried in 1991, telling the owners he did not abuse the house that sheltered him and had tried to leave their property intact, contrary to official reports that sabotage was practised on a wide scale. Subtitles explain that army and police officers as well as the owners of the house were all present during the digging -- carried out at the filmmaker's behest -- but they all refused to be filmed; that is why the camera remains fixed on the hole being dug for the film's 30-minute duration. Once again an individual's personal document becomes the centre of attention, while the official interpretation is marginalised. Using the same strategy, Zaatari adapts the official tendency to reject contrary points of view to his purposes. Such is the underlying style in Shoo Bhibak (How I Love You, 2001), where images of the faces and bodies of gay men are overexposed as they recount discovering their sexual orientation, and their attempts to practise it. Homosexuality, an abomination in Arab societies, is punishable by a minimum of one-year imprisonment in Lebanon, if a confession to having had any homosexual physical relation is obtained, as the film's opening title declares. Thus repression and censorship, a secondary theme of the film, is brought to the forefront of the discourse communicated, giving this documentary a particularly Arab twist. Al-Alaka Al-Hamraa (Red Chewing Gum, 2000), on the other hand, is Zaatari's 10-minute audio-visual poem -- about the recollection of a single act that took place perhaps 15 years ago, but is experienced repeatedly in the nostalgic present, connecting a chewing gum vendor with several white pieces of gum chewed until they run out of sugar, among which a single red piece gives colour to both the act and its memory, the persistence of which is underlined by using singer Amr Diab's relatively recent pop hit Tamali Maak (Always with You) as a motif. Homoeroticism filters into the Zaatari episode in the comedy Ba'albek (2001), where an intriguing hitch-hiker propel the two journalists on their way to cover a concert in Ba'albek featuring Syrian singer Sabah Fakhri and Canadian Celine Dion away from their destination. They end up going through the contents of his backpack while he goes for a swim in the stream. Soueid's episode in the same film depicts the journalists' journey against the backdrop of jungle sounds, with road billboards showing the late Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad (Al-Assad literally means "the lion") representing the rule of the strong. Again events in Palestine form the backdrop of this comedy, consisting of three versions of the same journey with the same two actors, directed by Ghassan Salhab, Zaatari and Soueid: radio news items are intercut with coverage of the concert. Crystallising the "feminine" identity crisis caused by the constant threat of inner as much as civil war, Soueid depicts Kholoud, a Syrian from Aleppo who lives in Beirut, in one of 14 documentary episodes he made for Lebanese Television in 1993. Due to its subject, however, the episode, Cinema Al-Fouad (the name of a movie theatre in Syria, literally "the cinema of the heart"), was banned. Kholoud was born male, but she dresses, works and behaves in society as a woman, in the hope of earning enough money to have a sex change operation. She falls in love with a Palestinian resistance activist and joins the resistance herself, hoping that the organisation will sponsor the surgery; otherwise, so she reasons, she will die a martyr. After her lover immigrates to Europe, she still sends him love letters. She loves old Egyptian films, and belly dancing is not only her hobby but, occasionally, due to financial straits, her job.
