Original subtitles

For whom? How many? When? And why?

Against who? How? Against what?

Enough of your violence...

Where are you from? Where are you going?

Who are you? Who do you pray to? Please be silent.

These Lebanese children are playing war like children all over the world.

They imitate street combat the same way others imitate

the Westerns they saw on TV.

But here, every one of these children

has lost a father, a mother,

a brother, a sister.

In their games they’re not recreating the fiction of a film,

but the daily reality of Beirut.

They’re playing “Phalangists against the left-wing and the Palestinians.”

This is not cowboys and Indians.

Their weapons all look the same,

But they already know that a Kalashnikov

is not a Factorio, or a Siminoff.

A child that dies at the end of your gun

Is a child... ...that dies

How terrible to have to choose between two types of innocence...

How terrible it is to have, as an enemy,

the laughter of childhood.

Last summer the children from the Lebanese high society

built sandcastles on this beach.

Today, the poor children, who escaped

the Phalangist massacre in the Karantina neighborhood,

are digging trenches.

20,000 dead in Lebanon this year.

Thousands of children traumatised, so obsessed by war and death,

that war is the only game they know.

War is their only game,

These wooden weapons are their only toys.

The sun, the beach, a holiday setting,

helps forget that while some are barefoot,

it isn't to play in the sand,

but because they can't afford to buy shoes.

All that they have to survive

are charity clothes, a ration card,

and the aggressiveness that they express in these games.

But you only have to interrupt their play fighting a moment,

to realise they have not forgotten reality.

I love playing war games...

so that when I’m older, I can become a Fidain

- I like playing war games. - Why?

-Why do you like playing war games? -Because I like shooting.

Why do you like shooting?

We’re training as well, and shooting at each other.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

God only knows, we might be dead.

Refugees in their own country, these pictures show

that through war, their old games have become

a dream.

Certain details, certain attitudes,

certain gestures that are a little too precise,

destroy the pretence and the childish playfulness.

They’re between 6 and 12 years old,

all day long they repeat the scenes of horror

that they’ve seen with their own eyes.

I'm afraid they’ll come and kill us in our homes.

Anyone who stayed at home was killed, but we managed to escape.

They didn’t stop us, they let us go.

In the end we surrendered and went to Sidon.

I was scared when the shooting started.

When the shooting started we got scared.

You become... afraid of the war.

You can’t run anymore.... when you need to run away.

I love war games.

When I grow up I want to be a Fidain.

Right now I’d like to go to school...

but they’re not opening the schools.

I’ll become a Fidain and avenge my father.

These children aren’t playing, they're training.

Different political factions take them when they’re very young.

Ali is 6 years old, Mooz 10, Mustafa 11,

Nawal 8, Walid 7, Nawaf 6...

They have never really been children.

At 10 years old, handling guns, they already look like adults.

In fact, even before coming to the training,

they already know how to handle guns.

Every Lebanese is armed,

and at home they’re taught how to assemble and dissemble a gun.

This little hand belongs to a 6 year old boy,

who can already load a gun, Ali.

And yet, it doesn’t take much,

for them to play at something other than death:

a few sheets of paper, some markers we gave out...

But the pictures are always about war.

I want to go to school. Every day I ask,

and she says, “No, there’s no school.”

- Why not? - I don’t know.

Every day they tell us: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.”

Today they say “tomorrow” and tomorrow they’ll say “tomorrow.”

They say: I was kidnapped,

they taught me sadness with blood, and they aged me,

although I'm just a child.

(smld)