Lebanese Civil War Doc 'Green Line': Statues for Childhood Trauma

“Fida grew up during the war in Beirut in the 1980s, immersed in the ‘red hell’ her grandmother told her about. The trivialization of death made her question the value of life and the meaning of this endless war that was so similar to so many others.”

This is the description of the new film by director Sylvie Ballyot Green linewhich had its world premiere at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in his International competition this week.

In this documentary about the Lebanese Civil War, Fida meets militia members and eyewitnesses using miniature figures and models to confront her childhood experience of witnessing a battle opposite her school when she was 10, in which 100 people were killed, with theirs. Fida is Elfida “Fida” Bizri who wrote the screenplay for the film with Ballyot.

The protagonist and the director, along with editor Charlotte Tourrès and producer Céline Loiseau, met film fans and the press in the picturesque swiss town from Locarno to discuss their film, a trailer of which you can watch on the The Locarno Festival website can be found hereand the story behind it.

“The idea itself, the desire, was born a long time ago,” Ballyot said. “I’ve known Elfida for 20 years. I met her just after the 2006 war, the last big war in Lebanon. And I understood, I felt when I met her that there was something in her. She spoke to me a lot about the boundary between life and death. She had a relationship with the language and grammar of war and violence, as she said, which immediately appealed to me, intrigued me.”

She felt then that she might have a role as a director to tell that story and reveal a deeper truth, but she didn't do anything right away. “Years later, much later, I wanted to write something,” the filmmaker explained. “It was originally a feature film, but it couldn't be made because of financial reasons, etc.”

That was a blessing in disguise, she argued. “Because of the impossibility of making this fictional film, which was almost a blessing, I had to make do with my own resources, so I started making scenes with little frames based on what Fida had told me about her past, her childhood – little bits and pieces.” When she showed it to her, “I understood that this little frame that you see in the film was already very cathartic for her,” Ballyot concluded.

Bizri shared her reaction to the proposal to make a film. “Sylvie told me about making a film. I didn’t really understand what that meant, but I wanted to be nice. So I said, ‘Yes, if you want, okay, why not,’” she recalled. “But I didn’t see myself in cinema at all, so I didn’t understand what it meant. If I had known what I know now, I would have been scared to do all that.”

Ballyot began by asking Bizri to tell her life story so she could act out scenes with the figurines. “When she first showed me, in an animated sequence with little figurines, a painful event that I had experienced when I was 22, which is not in the film now, it was really hard for me,” Bizri said. “Because for me and my painful memory – I don't know if it's like that for everyone if they don't understand what happens to them when they remember it later – I remembered solid, frozen images and no sequences at all.”

She continued: “So I remembered a frozen image: me standing. Another frozen image: me lying on the ground. But in between I had no image. My memory was very fragmented.” That also meant that she initially didn’t think the sequences Ballyot had created were accurate. “At first I said, ‘No, it’s not.’ Because I don’t remember falling. And she made me fall [in the film sequence]For example.”

Bizri added: “So she filled in the gaps between the images that I had in my head. And I found it both disturbing and very healing – because I was no longer held hostage by frozen images. And that was really important.”

Because the film was made in stages, there was more to it than meets the eye. “When Sylvie suggested in the second stage that I join the militia, I was terrified because I didn't want to open this box of memories and go see them and talk to them,” Bizri recalls. “But at the same time I said to myself: if seeing the statues had a positive side, maybe it could do that for others. And maybe it could open doors.”

Talking to the fighters, witnesses and different people in the neighborhood was still not easy. “They are very used to confrontation. But what made it work was that I did not confront them, I was interested in what they had to say,” Bizri said. “At first they did not understand my approach, because we generally come to them because we want to demand accountability. But I just wanted to understand. That made it easier.”