Name: Lebanon in Turmoil
Director: Jocelyne Saab
Released: 1975
Duration: 75 min

Synopsis

Months after the incident on April 13th 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were gunned down by the Phalangist militia, the numbers are even more horrifying: 6,000 dead, 20,000 injured, daily kidnappings and a capital city half destroyed. This film, a unique documentation of the Lebanese Civil War, goes back to the origins of the conflict as seen by a society that went to war singing and with their heads held high.

During the period in which I started to work as an independent filmmaker, after having worked for different television companies (French, Lebanese) as a sort of apprentice, the Lebanese Civil War started (1975). I knew that it was at the same time the end of an era and of a country, and I wanted to recount that by taking a path that was absolutely not a militant one, even if some people said that it was, perhaps as a result of the clumsiness of my explanations. I don’t believe in militant films because they are addressed to a category of people who are already convinced, and I, by contrast, wanted to gain the interest at wider groups.

Details

Year: 1975

Duration: 75 min

Country: Lebanon

Language: Arabic

Production: Jocelyne Saab

Credits

Director: Jocelyne Saab

DOP: Gérard Simo, Hassan Naamani

Editor: Philippe Gosselet, Marie-Jeanne de Susini

Sound: Marc Mourani, Michel Beruet

Copyrights: Jocelyne Saab Association

Filmed during a lull in fighting, between the 1st and 8th September, Lebanon in Torment is a documentary report that attempts to explain the origin of a fratricidal combat, of which the profound causes are, in the opinion of the filmmakers (Jocelyne Saab and Jorg Stocklin) essentially social and institutional. Without a doubt, it is this exact perspective, which runs counter to the preconceived ideas that are generally accepted in the West, that constitutes the main point of originality in this report. Usually seen as a war of religion, the conflict that divides the Lebanese is only such at surface level and inasmuch as the Lebanese State, by imposing upon its citizens that they announce their religious belonging on their identity cards, imposes upon them in the same act a means of self-discrimination. But beyond this compartmentalisation established by archaic institutions and more or less reinforced by the Lebanese, Christians and Muslims alike, beyond these Manichean appearances, how many other realities, as diverse as they are overlooked, have not nourished this conflictu2026?
Film pitch written by Jocelyne Saab and Jorg Stocklin

After filming in Iraq, Egypt and Syria for French television, in 1975 I directed a feature-length documentary, Lebanon in Turmoil, with the idea of letting everyone speak as a starting point. I made it without much technical expertise because I never went to film school and because my work is always very intuitive. After 1968, after the failure of the militancy, my starting point changed. But very quickly I realized that I was implicated in this war and that I couldnu2019t place myself, without, I believe - and this may be contradictory u2013 doing so partially. The determination that I had to get my work on television, to be able to touch many people in this way, made me rely much more on my treatment of images, which went much further, and with a vengeance, than militant films.
Words collected by Sylvie Dallet in Paris in 1983.