Children of Shatila opens with 1982 archive footage of Israeli war planes over Beirut, flames rising from the city, tanks moving inexorably towards Shatila, long panning shots over heaps of dead bodies of people, and a downed white horse, lines of heartbroken grieving women, men in face masks digging burial preparations. That was the history the children in the film never saw for themselves, but know in great detail from family and community lore. One boy talks with complete composure of how the bulldozers in the neighbourhood scooped up bodies of Palestinians and Lebanese together in death as they had been in life, and then, how his own aunt died, “Her head was cut off.” Mai’s technique is very rarely to use interviews, but rather to keep the camera running as ordinary life goes on with people talking, especially children, who have just got used to her being a part of it. Scenes in a classroom, in a family dinner, running through the alleys, jokes and games unfold so naturally that the viewer is in Shatila, not watching from the outside. There is truth conveyed in this seemingly effortless work method (which is in fact the fruit of a great investment of time and of listening skills) that could never be achieved in a traditional interview with all its opportunities for reflection before and cutting afterwards making for a confected product.
Children of Shatila shows a crowd of children watching boys’ and girls’ groups dancing the traditional dabka with everyone clapping along. Mai brought them a new game. She is glimpsed giving a small digital camera to one of the children, and the film begins to show the images and footage of one child after another as they turn the camera on the scene, on each other, even on her, and watch the images on the small screen with absolute wonder.
Children interview each other on film and tell each other their dreams of being grown up, how they will be doctors, engineers, spacemen, and how they will get their houses in Palestine back. Again, their own footage is shown as part of the film. They move through the camp as a group and one girl asks a very old neighbour sitting in the dusty alley outside his home what it had been like leaving Palestine, and what would he do first if he went back. “We were a wretched lot – barefoot,” he tells them of his family’s flight to Lebanon in 1948, before going on to say he would first rebuild his house on returning, then look after the land and the olive trees. He leans forward to speak intently into their camera as he tells the children to promise him that even if it takes 100 years or more they will never forget Palestine. This is the history that all of them know as well as if they have lived it themselves and which we see reflected in all the painting, poetry and dreams that fill the children’s lives.
Text by Victoria Brittain, author of Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2020
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