Beirut, 8 and 14 July 2021
This past year, like the one before it, was shrouded in grief. During that time, not only has Lebanon witnessed the worst financial and economic crisis in its history – the result of a decades-long Ponzi scheme led by the Central Bank and the Lebanese ruling class – but also the catastrophic Beirut Port explosion last August, which killed over 200 people, injured thousands and made more than 300,000 people homeless. As well as a global pandemic. Looking back on this time, I have to check my phone’s impossibly large photo library to try and retrieve a moment I stole away to watch a film or see a show in town. There weren’t that many. And I didn’t keep a record of any of them. That is not to say things were not happening; local cultural spaces and galleries were painstakingly installing shows and organising events, albeit small, some of which I was a part of in some capacity. I remember berating myself for not having the energy to see exhibitions that I should have gone to see, if only to enact change on the sluggish cadence that the city continually imposes on us. But it’s no use to push oneself to feel generous and inviting when you’re moving through the motions of grief, loss and exhaustion.
Yet on two different occasions in July I decided on a whim to shake myself out of this torpor by watching a pair of documentary films screened under the framework of Metropolis Cinema’s ‘Écrans du réel’, a yearly documentary film festival, which returned to the screens this year after being interrupted by the pandemic. It was my first time in a cinema since the pandemic started, and the weather was already punishingly hot and humid in Beirut, with very few electricity hours to turn on the air-conditioning at home. So it was such a relief to know that I could walk a few minutes and spend a couple of hours in a large, dark air-conditioned cinema. The fuel crisis had already become a painful reality by then and would worsen in the coming scorching months. In fact, it might have been impossible to host the film programme at all had it been scheduled a month later.
While I hid away in the dark, the two films, screened only days apart, seemed to reflect the inescapable realities of Lebanon. The first was Overseas (2019), a documentary by South Korean filmmaker Sung-A Yoon, which chronicles the rigorous training that young Filipino women receive before being employed in households across the Gulf region and other countries in Asia. The second was Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soueid’s sprawling three-hour The Insomnia of a Serial Dreamer (2020). Eighteen years in the making and featuring the filmmaker’s friends and loved ones, the film revolves around prolonged conversations about love, cinema and Beirut across different temporalities. Soueid, the titular insomniac, had hoped that their stories would put him to sleep.
To me, notions of departure weighed heavily in both films. Soueid’s film seemed to mark the end of an era in Beirut. It’s as though the filmmaker was bidding farewell to a host of places, people, stubborn and recurrent images (in the manner of impossible dreams), and to a version of the city that has already faded away. It was, at times, difficult to watch, not only because of how bad things were becoming outside of that cinema but also because Soueid succeeded in reeling us into his own nostalgia.
Yoon’s film captures, through an empathetic and restrained lens, the ways in which many migrant domestic workers prepare themselves emotionally to emigrate to farflung and hostile places – Beirut being one of them. It was hard not to see the ways in which the imminent departure of these women anticipates the uncertain futures that await them at the end of their journeys. And, later, to be conscious of the fact that they were soon to arrive in the very city that Soueid was leaving behind.
This past year has seen an unprecedented exodus of people, something I’ve been unable to reckon with. These departures, often too painful to come to terms with for those who remain here, have irrevocably changed the city and its people. I fancied myself immune to these pains before these past two years, but the acute sense of loss that envelops everyday life feels endless and cruel. Perhaps because it’s impossible for us to measure. Watching these two films, however, reminded me of the necessity to think about what remains to be done in a world so bereft. On the one hand to give ourselves the time to mourn what we have lost, and on the other to persevere in the fights we started – namely on questions of labour in this country – during the uprisings of 17 October 2019. The question we are left with concerns what we can still save from the rubble of our individual pain. Though it may take some time before we can emerge from mourning and grief, what will and should remain with us is our anger.
Rayya Badran is a writer and translator based in Beirut
