Nous étions communistes

Bachar, Hussein, Ibrahim, Maher: four Lebanese Marxists who lived through the 1980s together, resisting Israeli occupation as members of the communist party. Back in Beirut after 15 years in France, Maher, the filmmaker, reunites his friends in an attempt to understand the fragmentation of the capital and Lebanese society. One of them asks his friend: “You want just a secular resistance? But where are the secular forces?” On a city map, the four men mark out the Sunni, Druze, Christian and Muslim districts. What made a country of four million inhabitants split into eighteen antagonistic confessions? Where did the Lebanese communist party go wrong in its unifying role, with each member finally returning to their religious roots on its collapse in 1993? Imagining themselves back in time, to the street corners that he and his comrades occupied during the 1987 so called “University Battle”, the filmmaker invents a powerful construction around memory. And a moving one, as his goal is not so much to serve the film as to trigger memories. Like the gaping buildings (ruins? Or building sites?) whose images rhythm We Were Communists, the former comrades are open to the four winds, doing their best to resist an imposed identity.

Charlotte Garson