Moujarad Raiha

Four sequence shots in black and white, like a memorial card, separated by black on the disasters of the second Lebanese war in Beirut in summer 2006. Men, some with faces covered by gasmasks, search the ruins for bodies; a roadway at night, its outlines still visible despite the bombing, but now fl anked by ruins and rubble; men loading coffi ns into a van… All these shots are silent, occasionally punctured by the thud of stones shifted by the relief workers or the bump of a coffin against the van door. Silent, like an endless lament. The film opens with a quote from Jean Genet: “If you look closely at a corpse, an odd phenomenon occurs: the absence of life in this body corresponds to the total absence of the body […]” (Four Hours in Shatila). There are no corpses in these shots, nor a smell of death, which as we know leaves no mark on the film negative, but rather an omnipresent silence. Beirut from afar, fi lmed from the bridge of a foreign warship, with the town in the background, lost in the mist, the only shot that is not silent. Over the radio, the captain tells his crew to “get ready to evacuate our nationals”. (Yann Lardeau)