The primary purpose of a festival should not be a showcase where the audience can see, as privileged, the movies in preview. And not even a “disposable” event based mainly on red carpets graced by famous stars. A festival must, first of all, promote culture, be a meeting place where people can debate, get to know each other and enhance the works presented. A forum where participants, whether professionals or the public, can interact taking inspiration from the films screened or from the conferences and/or masterclasses organized. Among the many film festivals around the world, the Ismailia International Film Festival represents these mentioned peculiarities very well.
Established by the National Cinema Centre and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, the Festival – one of the longest-running in the region – has reached its 26th edition, and this year too, in its program, in addition to presenting valuable works (feature films and documentary shorts) and giving space to debuting filmmakers, it has privileged intercultural encounters. This edition is also important because for the first time the artistic direction was led by a woman, Hala Galal, director and producer.
This year’s program presented a varied selection of international documentary works, including ten feature films. Movies that have allowed us to learn about realities, large and small, that are not always known, and therefore, useful documents for understanding what has happened and what is happening (and what could happen). The key functions of the documentary genre are to collect and provide information, to try to adopt a “didactic” language and, above all, to be helpful to memory. It’s no coincidence that the conference “Documentary Cinema & Memory” took place on the first day of the festival, which well summarizes the selection of this edition.
The fil rouge that links the selected works is the importance of memory, and how cinema can be a valid – popular – means to preserve it and ensure that it is not lost. Especially after a war that destroyed civilization, and these ten feature films, which tell different stories, have war (and its metaphorical meanings) as their “common denominator”. Documentaries centered on conflicts that have torn apart cities and people, and pugnacious battles to defend people’s rights and not erase their memory. Stories from the past, reconstructed through found footage, or current testimonies, that recall the past to tell it and not let it be forgotten.
Among these ten works, Green Line (2024) by Silvye Ballyot excellently condenses these two aspects. A feature film that wants to carry forward memory and reconstruct the past through the tenacious investigation of Fida Bizri. A necessary interrogation that also seems to take inspiration from what Primo Levi wrote in his memoir “If this is a man” (Se questo è un uomo, 1947): “If understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary, because what happened can happen again, consciences can be seduced and darkened again: even ours”.
Already a winner at the 77th Locarno Film Festival (Mubi Award and First Prize Junior Jury Award), it won the Main Award at the Ismailia International Film Festival. Green Line draws on the experience of Fida, who as a child found herself unknowingly and innocently in the horror of the civil war that inflicted death and destruction on Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. A long and bloody conflict that has not really ended, but that continues with other wars, which increasingly weaken the precarious state of the country and its people. The latest attacks come from outside, from Israel, that is, since the war in Gaza began in October 2023.
There is a substantial filmography focused on the civil war and the suffering present of Lebanon, and among the many works, two stand out because they also had a good distribution in Western circuits. Nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film, Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman is a painful personal recollection – through animation – of the conflict that gripped Lebanon and the soul of the protagonist in those dark years; and the Golden Lion in Venice is Lebanon (2009) by Samuel Maoz, a fictional “kammerspiel” that in addition to showing the harrowing conflict for the Lebanese people, grotesquely “prods” the Israeli soldiers. Ballyot’s documentary is an ideal third piece that provides answers (although not definitive) to the two films just mentioned.
The “green line” in the title refers to that strip that separated the eastern part from the western part of Beirut. A political demarcation that was like a deep fault that separated a city that until then had been united, transforming it into an urban territory redesigned only for the purpose of conflict. Starting from that stigma and from historical facts that explained the reason for that long and bloody conflict, Ballyot and Bizri want to try to give some answers to the little girl Fida. Trying to reconstruct that period that suddenly threw an innocent person into the horror of war (buildings razed to the ground and lifeless bodies of adults and children lying on the streets). And like her, many other unaware people. And from this necessary motivation that Green Line also takes on the value of an educational documentary, at times with a narration from a – dark – fairy tale. In particular, when animation or “rudimentary” models are used. The first as a “childish” reconstruction of those years. The second to try to reconstruct, as if it were a Risk, the subdivision of the city and the positioning of the various Falangists. Fida’s aim is to understand, by questioning many of those who lived through those bloody years, their reasons for certain choices. To understand if they have doubts and to verify if – at least – they have made amends.
Face-to-face discussions with those who were simply extras (but with a gun in their hands they were the protagonists of the terror and deaths of civilians) to get some answers. Confronting phalangists, civilians, volunteers and her own parents, Fida gets replies that describe both the complexity of that conflict and the lightness of certain human decisions. And, as the found footage clearly shows, the only certain aspect is that conflict creates and leaves only irreparable destruction. And if, as previously written, one of the main responsibilities of a documentary is to collect memory, here is the rational intervention of a former soldier, who at the end nonchalantly plays with a plastic doll, sends shivers down your spine: his advice is to try to forget, to put everything behind you and start over. But forgetting means erasing history and therefore giving the possibility for such events to happen again. A city raised to the ground can be rebuilt, perhaps even better, but the torn souls of the survivors cannot be healed.
Roberto Baldassarre
©FIPRESCI