The Attack (Ziad Doueiri – Lebanon/Qatar/France/Belgium) 102 minutes
The Attack, the third film by Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, is a rare examination of Israeli society by an Arab filmmaker. Filmed in Tel Aviv and Nablus on the West Bank, it was banned in Doueiri’s native land, as well as in all other Arab League countries, for violating laws forbidding the normalisation of relations with Israel. It was an obtuse sanction, though entirely predictable and surely one Doueiri himself would have foreseen. Israel does not come out of the film, based on renegade Algerian army officer Yasmina Khadra’s novel, terribly well, but Doueiri’s film is not especially partisan either.
Palestino-Israeli actor Ali Suliman plays Dr Amin Jaafari, a West Bank Palestinian, who has risen, in the face of prejudice and suspicion, to become one of Israel’s most brilliant surgeons. The film begins with him receiving the country’s highest distinction for his profession. He speaks of tolerance and understanding, noting that all Arabs are a bit Jewish and all Jews have a bit of Arab in them. The next day however, a suicide attack in Tel Aviv kills 17 people in a restaurant in the middle of a children’s birthday party. Jaafari treats the victims, one of whom refuses to be operated on by an Arab doctor. After returning home later that evening, he is summoned back in, to be told that his Christian Arab wife (Reymond Amsalem) – whom he believed was visiting her family in Nazareth – was killed in the attack and is suspected by police to have been the bomber.
Dr Jaafari is incredulous that his wife could have been guilty yet he is taken in for questioning and subjected to borderline torture by the police. He is eventually released but his position at the hospital is then in jeopardy and there is even talk of stripping him of his Israeli citizenship. His house is vandalised and he decides to visit his family in Nablus for what appears to be the first time in decades. This is where the film falters badly. There are too many questions to be asked of the back story. Would a Palestinian from the occupied territories seriously neglect his family for so long, no matter how embedded he becomes in Israeli society? And even if that is possible, why does he remain in regular contact with his nephew Adel (Karim Saleh) when the latter is up to his eyeballs in paramilitary activity?
For all Suliman, previously seen in films such as Paradise Now, Lemon Tree and Body of Lies, tries to invest his character with real emotion, he is hampered by a script that ordains Jaafari be little more than a binary value, to be switched back and forth according to the plot’s meanderings. He is either the ‘Good Arab’ of Israeli social taxonomy, or he is an Uncle Tom for the Palestinians. Doueiri, who started off as a camera operator on Quentin Tarantino’s early films before making his debut with the fine Lebanese Civil War drama West Beirut, produces a slick, tense film that is very much in the style of contemporary Hollywood thrillers. But it is a bit too talky to really pass muster as one; the film’s efforts to resolve in the final ten minutes the lingering tension between inter-racial tolerance and national resistance are also too easily won. The Attack has much about it that is admirable and it is for the most part an intelligent film but its overly-schematic nature and narrative short-cuts make it ultimately disappointing.
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
The Lebanese Rocket Society – Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige
The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige – Lebanon/France/Qatar) 90 minutes
In the 1960s, as the space race was heating up between the global superpowers, a small recently established Armenian university in Beirut was conducting its own rocket program of sorts. The program was headed by Manoug Manougian, a young professor of mathematics at Haigazian University, and it launched ten solid-fuel Cedar rockets over the course of seven years. The program had no avowed political intentions – something inconceivable today – but political leaders from across the Arab world – Nasser in particular – did try to get in on the action, albeit without success.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s third feature traces the history of the program, tracking down the protagonists – Manougian is now a professor in Florida while the university’s president at the time John Markarian is living in retirement in Pennsylvania. The film begins with some coy humour – the directors’ rudimentary Google research throws up nothing but Hezbollah Katyushas as representing ‘Lebanese rockets’. A trip to Haigazian University is more fruitful, though the archive news reports are all in Armenian and they have to get a student to translate. This front-ending of the research difficulties is a bit unconvincing as, even if Manougian’s rocket program has been largely forgotten, it is not all that obscure. There are ample witnesses to it, particularly Harry Koundakjian, the father of Lebanese photojournalism, who documented several of the launches. There is also Youssef Wehbé, a former army officer charged with observing it, who says that the government’s interest in the project was ultimately of a military nature.
The idealism of Manougian and his students was eventually quashed when the Lebanese government, under international pressure, put a stop to the project in the late 1960s. The researchers themselves had also exceeded their own expectations, to the extent that they almost got themselves into trouble, when one rocket made it all the way to Cyprus. It landed in the sea but there was an international complaint from the British government, who had (and still have) a military base on the island. What might have been is imagined in a futuristic animated sequence of Lebanese space travel at the end of the film.
The Lebanese Rocket Society is a conventional enough documentary and lacks the spark of Hadjithomas and Joreige’s earlier films Perfect Day and Je veux voir, both of which straddled fiction and documentary. As in those films however, the civil war looms large; in a way, the real focus of the film is not the rocket program per se but the society that was lost to the 15-year conflict. In many respects, Lebanon has weathered the last forty years surprisingly well – despite the bloody conflict, the rise of terrorism, occupation by both Israel and Syria and sectarian tension which keeps the country forever teetering on the brink of collapse, the country is still there. There has been none of the wholesale ethnic cleansing and population movements that have seen countries elsewhere in the world emptied of ethnic groups throughout the 19th century. Even Lebanon’s Christian community is faring much better than many others in the Middle East.
That instability has its own impact on the filmmakers. As part of a range of art installations to accompany the film, they decided to rebuild one of the rockets and give it as a gift to Haigazian University. Of course, they have to persuade authorities they have no military intent. They garner the requisite permits only to have to start all over again when Saad Hariri’s government falls in January 2011. It is this sense of portraying a historical flux that the film itself inhabits that gives The Lebanese Rocket Society an unexpected edge. This film may be a much lighter one than its predecessors but Hadjithomas and Joreige continue to have a lot to say about a small country with a painful but fascinating history.
In the 1960s, as the space race was heating up between the global superpowers, a small recently established Armenian university in Beirut was conducting its own rocket program of sorts. The program was headed by Manoug Manougian, a young professor of mathematics at Haigazian University, and it launched ten solid-fuel Cedar rockets over the course of seven years. The program had no avowed political intentions – something inconceivable today – but political leaders from across the Arab world – Nasser in particular – did try to get in on the action, albeit without success.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s third feature traces the history of the program, tracking down the protagonists – Manougian is now a professor in Florida while the university’s president at the time John Markarian is living in retirement in Pennsylvania. The film begins with some coy humour – the directors’ rudimentary Google research throws up nothing but Hezbollah Katyushas as representing ‘Lebanese rockets’. A trip to Haigazian University is more fruitful, though the archive news reports are all in Armenian and they have to get a student to translate. This front-ending of the research difficulties is a bit unconvincing as, even if Manougian’s rocket program has been largely forgotten, it is not all that obscure. There are ample witnesses to it, particularly Harry Koundakjian, the father of Lebanese photojournalism, who documented several of the launches. There is also Youssef Wehbé, a former army officer charged with observing it, who says that the government’s interest in the project was ultimately of a military nature.
The idealism of Manougian and his students was eventually quashed when the Lebanese government, under international pressure, put a stop to the project in the late 1960s. The researchers themselves had also exceeded their own expectations, to the extent that they almost got themselves into trouble, when one rocket made it all the way to Cyprus. It landed in the sea but there was an international complaint from the British government, who had (and still have) a military base on the island. What might have been is imagined in a futuristic animated sequence of Lebanese space travel at the end of the film.
The Lebanese Rocket Society is a conventional enough documentary and lacks the spark of Hadjithomas and Joreige’s earlier films Perfect Day and Je veux voir, both of which straddled fiction and documentary. As in those films however, the civil war looms large; in a way, the real focus of the film is not the rocket program per se but the society that was lost to the 15-year conflict. In many respects, Lebanon has weathered the last forty years surprisingly well – despite the bloody conflict, the rise of terrorism, occupation by both Israel and Syria and sectarian tension which keeps the country forever teetering on the brink of collapse, the country is still there. There has been none of the wholesale ethnic cleansing and population movements that have seen countries elsewhere in the world emptied of ethnic groups throughout the 19th century. Even Lebanon’s Christian community is faring much better than many others in the Middle East.
That instability has its own impact on the filmmakers. As part of a range of art installations to accompany the film, they decided to rebuild one of the rockets and give it as a gift to Haigazian University. Of course, they have to persuade authorities they have no military intent. They garner the requisite permits only to have to start all over again when Saad Hariri’s government falls in January 2011. It is this sense of portraying a historical flux that the film itself inhabits that gives The Lebanese Rocket Society an unexpected edge. This film may be a much lighter one than its predecessors but Hadjithomas and Joreige continue to have a lot to say about a small country with a painful but fascinating history.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Pax Lebanona
The bombing of Lebanon enters its third week and the peace talks in Rome have failed, while Tsahal, the Israeli Defence Force, has suffered its worst day of losses so far, with 14 soldiers killed in clashes with Hizbollah. Hizbollah are providing stiffer resistance than expected, being armed with sophisticated 220mm rocket launchers, and yesterday they showered northern Israel with 100 rockets. The fact that these undoubtedly came from Syria only underlines the Israelis' resolve and reason to prosecute the war to its end, whatever that may be.
I am not going to go into the rights and wrongs of the conflict (this balanced and well-documented Wikipedia article can provide background - though be wary, as ever on Wikipedia, of the complete accuracy of entries); suffice to say however that Israel's reaction has been excessive, a comparison of the body counts on either side demonstrates this. It might also be useful to remember that the British government, during the IRA 'spectaculars' throughout the 1970s and 1980s never deemed it necessary to bomb either Dublin or Belfast as retribution; nor did Felipe Gonzalez's hardly admirable Spanish government do the same to the Basque Country (particularly that part of it that lies outside Spanish borders and where many separatists took refuge) during ETA's even bloodier bombing campaign. Like Israel's over-reaction during the Intifada, the bombing of Lebanon will only intensify resentment of the country in the region. We Europeans are often a bit too self-righteous when it comes to criticizing Israel - we would probably be just as resolute in the face of suicide bombings and rocket attacks - but we have known, in our own circumstances, when to temper our responses to suit the outrage. There are, no doubt, greater geo-political considerations at play, many of which are emanating from Washington, but there is no guarantee that these considerations will ultimately be good for Israel.
For a ground-level view of what is going on in Beirut, check out the blog of Lebanese artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj, blackly humorous and packed with the prolific Kerbaj's illustrations and cartoons. My favourites are the gnomic "Sleeping and Waking Up" and "Freedom Flag", hilarious. There is also this link to a recording Kerbaj made of himself playing his trumpet on his balcony to the sounds of bombs exploding in the surrounding neighbourhoods. It's more eerie than catchy and unlikely to end up on your iPod.
For a greater range of blogs on the crisis, from Israeli, Palestinian and Lebanese nationals, go to The Truth Laid Bear's syndication, a link for which I am indebted to Limerick man Eamonn Fitzgerald's always entertaining, if crazily right-wing, Rainy Day blog. Hello again, Eamonn.
I am not going to go into the rights and wrongs of the conflict (this balanced and well-documented Wikipedia article can provide background - though be wary, as ever on Wikipedia, of the complete accuracy of entries); suffice to say however that Israel's reaction has been excessive, a comparison of the body counts on either side demonstrates this. It might also be useful to remember that the British government, during the IRA 'spectaculars' throughout the 1970s and 1980s never deemed it necessary to bomb either Dublin or Belfast as retribution; nor did Felipe Gonzalez's hardly admirable Spanish government do the same to the Basque Country (particularly that part of it that lies outside Spanish borders and where many separatists took refuge) during ETA's even bloodier bombing campaign. Like Israel's over-reaction during the Intifada, the bombing of Lebanon will only intensify resentment of the country in the region. We Europeans are often a bit too self-righteous when it comes to criticizing Israel - we would probably be just as resolute in the face of suicide bombings and rocket attacks - but we have known, in our own circumstances, when to temper our responses to suit the outrage. There are, no doubt, greater geo-political considerations at play, many of which are emanating from Washington, but there is no guarantee that these considerations will ultimately be good for Israel.
For a ground-level view of what is going on in Beirut, check out the blog of Lebanese artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj, blackly humorous and packed with the prolific Kerbaj's illustrations and cartoons. My favourites are the gnomic "Sleeping and Waking Up" and "Freedom Flag", hilarious. There is also this link to a recording Kerbaj made of himself playing his trumpet on his balcony to the sounds of bombs exploding in the surrounding neighbourhoods. It's more eerie than catchy and unlikely to end up on your iPod.
For a greater range of blogs on the crisis, from Israeli, Palestinian and Lebanese nationals, go to The Truth Laid Bear's syndication, a link for which I am indebted to Limerick man Eamonn Fitzgerald's always entertaining, if crazily right-wing, Rainy Day blog. Hello again, Eamonn.
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