Simon El Habre (Lebanon) | Lebanon | 2008 | 86 min | Arabic spoken, English subtitles
Voices from the Middle East, in collaboration with Beeld voor Beeld – Documentary Film Festival on Cultural Diversity.
Semaan is leading a quiet life on his farm in the small village Ain el-Halazoun in the Lebanese mountains. The hamlet was completely destroyed in combats during the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. Today, many years after an official reconciliation, its inhabitants which are all from one family regularly go back to the village to cultivate their plots of land or visit their houses but they always leave before sunset.
The film observes the life in this quasi ghost village and tries to reflect on the collective and individual memory in a country that seems to live in a collective amnesia and is vulnerable to a new civil war.
