By Abir Chaaban
"Her Journey in the Cave" is a post-modern musical documentary that tells the story of a female academic/researcher in her late-forties. Abir is the main character. She is a citizen of Canada born in Kuwait to a Lebanese father. She experienced the Lebanese civil war during the eighties. She is working independently on a research project in Lebanon between the years 2010-2014. She is an Instructor of Political Communication at the Lebanese American University. This period produces the “Arab Spring “, a bloody conflict in Syria, one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon and a wave of terrorist attacks on Lebanese civilians.
Abir was a Radio/TV and Film student during the civil war. She had in her possession footage of Beirut when it was destroyed. She left Lebanon after graduating in 1989. The footage remained with her for 24 years. In 2014 it comes back to a full cycle where it is used to construct the contrast between destruction (1988) and construction of Beirut in 2004 in a film about violence, peace and security in Lebanon.
The story is composed of two parts. The first part is entitled “My Memory of the Past”. This part is at post production stage. It requires funding for professional editing and professional shooting and re-shooting of some scenes using professional equipment and a camera man. A rough cut using available footage is uploaded on YouTube. It tells the overall story of part I. Abir's memory of the past is documented as flashbacks into images of the civil war, reconstructing the main events of the Lebanese civil conflict from 1975-1983. It uses music and musical lyrics of Pink Floyd the Wall and Micheal Franti as core to the development of the story between the past and the present. Flashbacks are constructed within an interactive dialogue emerging in class from student’s read assignments and the researcher’s reflections about the assignments.
The assignments dealt with three issues associated with conflict in Lebanon. The first issue is the documentation of history, the second is the construction of identity and the third is peace and security. Two generations stand in contrast. The first is the generation that experienced the civil war as children. Second is the generation that only heard about the war and lacks a comprehensive history book of the war.
Part II. of the film is called “Genealogies of the Construction of Race. It takes the audience to the present of Lebanon and associated sectarian mobilization as it develops with the Syrian conflict. It starts with wave of terrorist explosions that overwhelmed Lebanon. Abir then starts exploring the dichotomy between what the media paints as spring, and the deadly battles and racial mobilization in the midst of the burning of towns that had engulfed Lebanon and Syria.
The story develops as Abir moves into the journey inside the Syrian refugee camps in the Bekka Valley. Abir is working on the depiction of the historic identities utilized by the Islamist militancy to mobilize into conflict in Syria and the utilization of this discourse to recruit militants in Lebanon.
The emphasis is placed on the shift of the identity discourse from Arab and non-Arab as it was core to the Lebanese civil conflict to Shi’a and Sunni which is core to the Syrian conflict.
The Impact
The aim of this story is to establish a dialogue between two generations in a country that does not have a unified history book. “My Memory of the Past” exposes the role of myth in the construction of identity by the narrative of Abir, of her experience of the past. The story takes the audience through out the First World War, going through the Holocaust and problematizes the concept of the historical nation-state and its relationship to displacement of population and ethnic cleansing. It brings to the Lebanese youth issues that are not discussed within the locality of Lebanon, primarily the Holocaust and its relationship to the displacement of the Jews and the consequent problem of the Palestinian refugees. It leaves the audience with open questions and highlights the importance of peace as the only option for coexistence.Part II. takes the youth to the present and demonstrates the role of historical discourse in the process of the mobilization of Sunni-Shi'a conflict in Syria. The idea is to get the audience out of the box of journalistic analysis of the conflict and bring to the front radicalism associated with any religious and ethnic conflict dividing the population into superiors and inferiors by the utilization of historical discourse of identity.
The target of this documentary is the youth that is disinterested in reading about history. This documentary aims to educate, and create awareness to the youth about the complexities associated with the documentation of the history of conflict, the destruction associated with conflict, and the threat Lebanese society faces today with the production of historical discourse aiming to mobilize into sectarian conflict. Informal research was conducted with a small sample of youth at the Lebanese American University, unanimously they desire more visual than talk. Thus, incorporating music and lyrics aims at simplifying the intake of complex historical information.