In 1975, a group of young Lebanese men joined the Palestinian Fatah organization, known as the Student Battalion, and took part in the Lebanese civil war. Some were killed, some left the country. The Palestinian armed forces left Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 1982. The Student Battalion was dissolved, and the young ex-combatants became old men, treating their loneliness with alcohol, poetry and songs.

“On the surface, Nightfall is a semi-autobiographical reconstruction of the militant years of Fatah’s Student Brigade; a series of conversations and interviews between the director and his old comrades, most of whom spend their time meditating their movement’s defeat in a state of drunken incoherence. Throughout NIGHTFALL, Soueid remains uncompromisingly bleak about the state of the Palestinian revolution at the turn of the new millennium. It is not just the individual militants who now suffer from a crisis of identity, but the very slogans of the struggle itself – and thus, its history. What is to be recovered, then, from the ramblings of these old Maoists?” –Francesco Anselmetti, SAFAR JOURNAL