Paired together, Khadijeh Habashneh’s Children, Nevertheless and Randa Chahal Sabbag’s Step by Step provide a micro and macro view on neighboring Lebanon and Palestine’s history of solidarity and discord, both motivated by the Arab Nationalist movement.
CHILDREN, NEVERTHELESS
(أطفال …ولكن)
Dir. Khadijeh Habashneh, 1979.
State of Palestine. 22 mins.
In Arabic with English subtitles.
In 1976, the Tel al-Zatar refugee camp came under siege from right-wing militias looking to expel Palestinians from Lebanon. The violence peaked with a massacre in which hundreds of children died and 15,000 residents were forced to flee — half of them children, some of them too small to be able to say their own names. Produced by the PCI and the GUPW, Children Nevertheless (also known as Children Without Childhood) shows the lives of the orphans of those killed in the massacre now living in Bait El-Somoud, a housing facility which was established for them by the GUPW. Habashneh’s film discusses the contradictions between the International Declaration of Child Rights and the reality of the living conditions of Palestinian children suffering in diaspora camps and under the Israeli occupation.
screening with
STEP BY STEP…
(Pas á pas…)
Dir. Randa Chahal Sabbag, 1979.
Lebanon, France. 80 mins.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.
Shot between February 1976 and March 1978, Step by Step compacts the chaos of the Lebanese civil war into its short run time using archival images, news broadcasts, interviews, and raw documentary footage. Sabbag’s work is sprawling, brutal, and poetic in its approach and clarity even as the span of history it attempts to communicate is long and winding. In the lead up to the civil war, Palestinian refugees spilled in increasing numbers through the Lebanese border and the PLO’s operations within Lebanon alarmed the conservative Phalangist Party. Formed in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel after visiting Germany, the Phalangists were a right-wing Maronite Christian political group that dominated the Lebanese civil war, collaborated with Israel, and fought against pro-Palestinian forces. Sabbag’s film places the Palestinian struggle for liberation in the context of this broader conflict, tracing the dismemberment of Lebanon and the shifting balance of powers in the Middle East as the United States (via Henry Kissinger) manipulated the region during this time.
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