Original subtitles

Here it is...

This is my house.

What's left of it.

I can't talk about the others any more.

It's cynical but...

Here it is...

This was my room.

This was where we were planning a film.

It was two stories.

In the end it's alright, because...

they're only walls after all...

and we all made it out alive.

To think of how many have died in recent days...

Either from the bombing, the Israelis,

or from internal fighting...

I don't know, I wonder, I'm asking myself.

The important thing is to stay alive, to live.

It's true that this house does represent a tradition,

that it moves me, in my heart.

It has 150 years of history.

And it's also my identity.

Like everyone else, all the Lebanese,

who have lost their homes, their property...

And then, we don't know who will rebuild it.

We don't know who we are anymore.

When did all of this begin?

A black Saturday or a fateful April...

some years ago.

The war took its time.

Or rather, it took our time.

A portion of our life was whisked away,

so that for many of us,

between childhood and maturity there is a word missing:

youth.

Today the dates are unclear,

images size each other up, in confrontation,

the time of an awakening,

making room for the form that memory will take,

after appearances have disappeared.

There was a madman in the city.

A fool.

A lovely barbed flower in a city sick with gangrene.

When we filmed him,

we did not yet know that he was a spy.

A disguised Israeli soldier.

We did not yet know what Beirut was hiding.

Nor did we know him, or those he still seemed not to know.

Man always believes what he sees.

And what he sees is always fooling him.

The madman was not mad.

The city was not what it appeared to be.

Beirut, brothel city,

whore city, cruel mother...

That was how we saw it before.

That was what we called it.

Finance, espionage,

aggressive, destructive modernity,

the most brazen political venality,

supermarket of trafficking and betrayal...

Beirut was all of that.

Or seemed to be.

How much did it take

for the illusion to fall away,

and the reality of the stone to begin to speak?

Beirut, city whose history is not in books...

Beirut, your history is one of men who lie.

When it touched us, our family or those close to us,

we suddenly realized the intimacy of the relationship that the city

had formed with death.

Karim, the sweet and gentle.

Karim, the good.

Killed by the war.

Nothing was less like him than the violence of his death.

Today we know how much he merited his name.

Karim, meaning "generous."

And all of us who knew him,

at our lowest point, had at least one friend.

War is everything empty and full.

The bombs make holes, empty spaces, tombs,

and life rushes in and fills them up,

everywhere death seemed permanent.

Each space becomes a story.

Each name becomes a memory.

Suddenly, one day, there was West Beirut.

Beirut Algharbia.

Isolated behind a shield of fire, iron and hate.

After the beginning of the civil war in 75,

Beirut, split in two, could still breathe,

thanks to the paths that the violence and conflict had not blocked...

until the day when Sharon, occupying Beirut East,

imposed his verdict.

Accused of coexisting with the Palestinians,

The population of West Beirut was condemned.

Which way did the gates of the city shut?

Who was the prisoner? Who was keeping the other at bay?

The ones in West Beirut?

Deprived of electricity, running water, flour, and fresh food...

using the water leaking from broken pipes...

and plugging their TVs into car batteries,

to watch the world cup with their neighbors?

Or the ones on the other side of the city,

invisible to us,

whose only language was a deluge of shells of every calibre,

and a gigantic, murderous, impotent machine,

which raged against the city that defied it?

The executioner uncovered the beauty of the victim.

And the truth of the city sprung from the wounds inflicted on its living body.

This garden, I planted it.

It was all covered in rubbish.

Nobody helped me, I moved it all.

Grass is stronger than bombs.

You see? There they are... What can we do?

The eye captures what the hand cannot. I'm not afraid anymore.

The airplanes that attack are up there, and I'm here.

We are the ones in the right, that's all.

Too much has been said about the horror and devastation,

about the death reigning down on us,

coming from elsewhere.

In war, in the end,

the images we hold onto, that we tend to respond to,

are the ones that show the presence of an enemy.

Their war. Their crimes.

Their images projected on the city.

All these images of death, layered on each other,

so that you no longer see the people who cling to life with such passion,

that they give birth to the city and give it a soul.

We said, I am from West Beirut,

with a touch of pride,

and the conviction of having laid bare the dimension of the Israeli army,

seeing them forced to show all their power,

and reveal their impotence.

And when people ask, "how are you?"

we've started replying, snidely,

— Still living.

We said, I am from West Beirut,

and at least for once,

we had a language and behavior

that went beyond the norms of our smaller communities.

We could be Shiite or Christian,

Jew or Sunni,

Lebanese or Palestinian,

and be it truly, faithfully,

while also being, in the same time and same place,

someone from West Beirut,

where the form of a possible society was lived,

that of a certain Arab dream,

the unachieved desires of a condemned people.

Beirut in agony had the features of a utopia:

being both Lebanese and Arab, that was possible;

Jew and Palestinian, that existed;

Muslim and progressive, it could happen;

Woman and boss, there were some;

Anarchist and organized, it was common.

But utopia has a price,

and we did not yet know that the bill would be devilishly high.

We won't leave Beirut. I've been here 30 years. I am 30.

In the name of the great and merciful God...

I pray to you, Lord of men...

to protect me from the horrible evil that infiltrates the hearts of men...

and originates from the devil and from man...

The path is long between what has been proven and what is said,

and from what is said to what is understood.

The word "pain" falters...

the unspeakable is stronger.

When pain has become a spectacle it's already too late.

We are already tourists in the land of suffering.

The measure of compassion is not the same as that of pain.

And before the ruins of a bombed out building...

an indefinable distance...

separates those who are moved by what they see...

from those one who cry for what they no longer see.

But fate had more in store:

the return of an image we thought we had seen the last of.

Every nook and cranny has been hit by bullets and bombs,

and marked by all of the multiple wars we have known.

The space of the image has only two dimensions.

You have to strike much harder to eradicate it.

As an Arab expression says:

you have to treat it as if it never existed,

to use it towards its own defeat.

You need to terrorize the image,

until men will choose to forget it.

And yet there are some images I have seen so often,

and other images I've seen time after time,

that it sometimes seems like it's them looking at me,

and they recognize me.

The walls and roads of Beirut's devastated neighborhoods...

walls that house no one,

answered by streets that lead nowhere.

A message without nuance for those who wander here.

With no home or place to go,

everything is refused them.

The proof is in the emptiness of their inexistence.

And when the bulldozers finish the job,

we may as well say:

"There was never anything here"

The ruins of Fahkani, Sabra and Shatila...

provided visitors what seemed like

the final devastation at the end of a war.

And we couldn't see the stage was already set

for a suspended massacre.

A little longer, and the picture would be complete.

I don't dare to say finished, in case I'm wrong.

And we will have to move fast,

to flush out their consciences,

and give them new images,

to show them the extremity of their blindness.

The immediacy of the vision of mutilated corpses,

eyes gouged out,

scalped heads,

bodies gutted by axes,

would disgust the world,

and strain the acceptable level of voyeurism.

But how is this carnage any different from what came before?

And why is the tax on horror so selective?

Opinion is such that

aerial bombing may be criminal but it is not repulsive.

Killing with bombs is not a barbarous, inhuman massacre.

The nuance is technical, and the spectacle is perceived differently.

And I can understand why the thousands of prisoners captured by Israel

cannot be seen.

The tortures they suffer are well-known,

reported, confirmed.

It matters little if it's talked about, as long as it is not seen.

The bands covering the prisoners' eyes...

bound for an all-too-familiar inhumanity...

are a reflection of our own blindness.

Locked within the visible,

opinion falls in line behind the repressed gaze.

And on the other side, the side of the victims,

The proof lies not in a shocking instant,

but rather in the duration, in the now continuous price paid,

for a defiance that is too human, and thus excessive,

The price of utopia.

Beirut West had its day.

Its story ends here.

All that's left is to domesticate its memory.

From the sublime and sordid background

of our history with the Palestinians,

what was emerging was a kind of nostalgia.

Nostalgia for a desire that, occasionally,

we were able to live.

The farewell to the fedayeen,

with epic undertones...

the immense liturgy in honor of their departure,

was only an expression of recognition.

It was are-cognition.

We all suffered,

we all paid,

with flesh and stone,

in order to save an image of ourselves that we believed we were heir to,

and to not have Israeli tanks in the streets of our gutted city.

It was too much to ask

The dead were not yet dead enough,

and the living too intact, their eyes too open.

How many of them have since returned to their modest homes,

in Sabra and Shatila?

Probably many of them.

They were the ones who went the farthest.

Today, I am in Paris,

looking out over a great void.

And, now and then...

in order to have a face,

in order to see,

I close my eyes,

and I remember.

subtitles by smld at k g