by Jim Quilty
The body of the film is a series of conversations with Hizbullah members Khadija and Zeinab, interspersed with historical footage from the civil war and the Israeli occupation of the South.
People are queued up outside a booth holding squares of white paper. The man inside never emerges. When the attendant finally comes forward to check on him it turns out he’s hanged himself, white chit still pressed between thumb and forefinger.
After a moment the attendant takes the corpse by the wrist, drags it over the black box and stuffs the ballot inside. Job done, he drags the smiling corpse off stage.
This is one of several hilarious mime routines, the funniest of which work with the similarities between voting booth and washroom, ballot and toilet paper. They were performed by students from Lebanese University’s Performing Arts Faculty on the opening night of Beirut Film Days at Masrah Beirut.
The mime act contributed to the highly entertaining vaudeville aspect of the opening night. There were also slide shows, a puppet show, the nightclub-style singing of Nadine Awad and the agonizing body contortions of Luzene Tobalian.
But the centerpiece was the premier of Maher Abi Samra’s documentary Zeinab and Khadija, Women from Hizbullah.
The title is transparent enough. The body of the film is a series of conversations with Hizbullah members Khadija and Zeinab, interspersed with historical footage from the civil war and the Israeli occupation of the South.
The pretense of objectivity - which in older documentary traditions was as deceptive as it was fictive - is nowhere to be found here.
The director positions himself in the film immediately. He informs the viewer that he was an activist for political secularism when Hizbullah emerged in the early 1980s and that at the time he regarded the Party of God to be a retrogressive force in Lebanese politics.
Yet this isn’t the point that Women drives home. Once Abi Samra places himself he steps aside and focuses on Zeinab and Khadija - two generations of women activists in the party - and a few more vignettes from other party members.
The film’s great strength is that though it moves through an environment charged with ideology, its driving force isn’t ideological but humanistic.
The heart of the documentary (emotional and structural) is the stories the women tell about how they came to the party, the role it has come to play in their lives, and how they position their aspirations within it.
Men aren’t absent of course. Women does examine the issue of the fighters’ martyrdom and how Zeinab and Khadija reconcile the feelings of wife, mother, and sister to their ideological positions.
And the women’s emotional expression of their belief is sometimes difficult to fathom for the outsider - at point Khadija says that none of her sons have been martyred and wonders why she hasn’t yet been deserving of the honor.
At the same time the women Abi Samra has chosen for the camera don’t come across as automatons. Both recognize that their positions on martyrdom may be inconceivable to others and they resist the perception that they are simply fanatics.
Circumstances, Zeinab explains, have simply made it necessary for them to shoulder the burden of being widowed, of their children being orphaned.
Khadija and Zeinab are remarkably progressive in their views - Zeinab observes, for instance, that if marriage means that so many women must be unhappy then perhaps marriage ought to be dispensed with.
If these views aren’t being acted upon right now, they explain, it’s simply because, at a time when the country is still at war and so many people are so badly off - the party must present a united front.
It’s a rationale that has been heard many times before, from different parties engaged in other struggles. In the end, the viewer may not be convinced by the women’s convictions or ideology. But, it is possible to see the social and economic context in which they have come, and can continue to come, to these convictions of their own accord.
Cinema Days continues at Masrah Beirut until March 4
©The Daily Star Online
RSS 2.0