Our Headless Wars

Barely had the war ended in the Lebanon when it broke out in what was then Yugoslavia. TV reporting of the Lebanon Conflict came to a sudden halt. What remains after seventeen years of war? The recurring scenes of shootings and bombings, the countdown of the days and months in the Western hostage crisis, and a few highly original films on daily life during the war (notably 'Beirut, Last Home Movie' and 'Why So Many Soldiers?' presented at INPUT in 1992 and 1993). Randa Chahal Sabbag´s film is something altogether different in that she belongs to a family which is played an important part, both in military and political terms, in the civil war (1975-1982) as well as in the clashes with Syria (1982-1992). The director´s father co-founded the Lebanese Communist Party; her Iraqi mother is a communist and a women´s rights activist; her sister is a political representative of the LCOA (Lebanese Communist Action Organisation); and her brother – politically neutral – enjoys the fighting and the unreal atmosphere of a country at war. Randa Chahal Sabbag was living in Paris and travelling back and forth to the Lebanon. Year in, year out, she filmed the gradual destruction of her city, Beirut. In 1994, she decided to record on film interviews with her family and to pay tribute to her deceased father. The film does not set out to list the chronology of events or to give explanations for the presence of the warring forces, the changes in alliance, and the role of the super-powers. Instead, in the light of the final toll of the disaster and as a creation against the desire to forget and erase the past, it offers us a more sensitive, philosophical reflection on why one should choose to join the conflict and sometimes get to like its mixture of hopes, fears and disillusions. The film provides a new look at a tragedy which television has far from thoroughly explored.