June 14, 2000
ARTS ABROAD
A Filmaker Without Honor or Outlets in Her Own Land
By ALAN RIDING
ARIS, June 12 -- Randa Chahal Sabbag
insists that her new film about the Lebanese
civil war, "A Civilized People," was not
designed to shock. Rather, she says, she
simply wanted to remind her compatriots of
the collective madness that led
them to spend the best part of 17
years killing one another and
destroying their country. Of
course this filmmaker also
wanted to air a few thoughts of her own.
"It angers and disgusts me to hear Lebanese saying that they were only victims of
the war," Mrs. Sabbag, who was born in
Tripoli, explained in an interview in her
home in Paris, where she lives with her
husband and three children. "It was our
war, and we should not play the innocent. I
tell my story through people of all classes
and religions as a way of saying that all
Lebanese are responsible for the war. Unless we accept responsibility for every bullet, we will never become a nation."
This is a proposition, however, that the
Lebanese have been unable to debate. When
Mrs. Sabbag submitted her drama for approval by Lebanon's Interior Ministry last
year, she was told that the film would give
the country a bad image abroad, that it used
excessively vulgar language, and that it
insulted both Islam and Christianity. The
ministry's military censors then proposed
cuts representing about 50 minutes of the 97-minute film. Mrs. Sabbag refused to accept
them.
Still unseen in Lebanon, "A Civilized People" has been chosen to open the Human
Rights Watch International Film Festival at
9:15 on Wednesday night in the Walter
Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Further
screenings will take place at 3:45 p.m. on
Thursday, 6:30 p.m. on Friday and 1 p.m. on
Monday. Mrs. Sabbag, 45, is also to
be awarded the Nestor Almendros
Prize for courage in filmmaking,
named after the Academy Award-winning Cuban cinematographer
who spoke out against human rights
abuses in his country.
Mrs. Sabbag's film is not itself
overtly political: it addresses neither the merits of the numerous factions engaged in the war nor the 1991
peace accord that proclaimed no
winners or losers and enabled innumerable war crimes to go unpunished under a general amnesty. The
film's purpose, though, is political:
by revisiting the hatred that drove
the conflict, she hopes that her countrymen (and women) can draw some
conclusions about their behavior, she
said.
Adopting something of the soap-operatic structure of Pedro Almodóvar movies, "A Civilized People"
dwells on a dozen or so characters
whose lives are variously battered
and twisted by the war. These include not only Christian and Muslim
combatants (Samir, a particularly
deranged Christian sniper, is played
by Mrs. Sabbag's brother, Tamim
Chahal) but also a private chauffeur
whose son has been kidnapped, a
wealthy woman who arrives from
France to rejoin her lover, a Christian girl who falls for a Muslim fighter and children who urge their elders
to kidnap foreigners for ransom.
The film's opening sequence well
illustrates the cheapness of life in the
1980's in Beirut: two young men blow
themselves up while tying explosives
on the back of a cat. The only "civilized people" in the movie are maids
from Egypt, Sri Lanka and the Philippines who have been left in charge
of homes abandoned by bourgeois
Lebanese exiles. A French volunteer
from Doctors Without Borders, on
the other hand, is portrayed as an unwelcome interfering foreigner.
Most of the objections presented
by the Lebanese censors relate to
language and scenes thought to be offensive to religious groups, not only
religious and sexual expletives but
also one scene in which a coffin is
kicked into an open grave and another in which the crazed Samir
shoots a Catholic priest. The censors
also complained about the portrayal
of physical affection between two
Egyptian maids who are lesbians.
After the censors published their
list of proposed cuts, Mrs. Sabbag
was denounced in some Beirut
mosques, and she and her crew were
subjected to death threats. She also
found much of the Beirut press lined
up against her, with the local English-language newspaper, The Daily
Star, saying she had no reason "to
expect the authorities in her troubled
homeland to subject a still-recovering populace to the shocking scenes
and repulsive profanity that mar her
latest effort."
Mrs. Sabbag said that only after a
few journalists saw the film on cassette did some begin to defend her.
She also began negotiating with Sunni Muslim leaders -- she is herself
Sunni -- and agreed to cover four offensive passages with bleeps. "I did
so to save the film and protect my
family and also because my lawyers
told me there is a law of blasphemy
in Lebanon," she explained. But so
far the French-financed film has
only been released, to mixed reviews, in France.
"I think the film is very sweet,
much sweeter than many American
films," Mrs. Sabbag said. "How can I
make a film about war without any
images of violence or insults or
blood? How can you make a film
about life without showing life? Or it
is because I am a woman that they
want me to make something different? I didn't try to provoke. I could
have made something far more provocative."
Certainly "A Civilized People" is
infinitely less violent and blasphemous than what occurred during the
Lebanese civil war. On the other
hand, while Lebanon is not the first
country to opt for amnesia over self-examination after emerging from a
period of fratricidal, ethnic or religious conflict, the controversy surrounding the film is a measure of the
fragility of its current peace, a peace
that has still not turned Lebanon into
a fully democratic and independent
nation.
For Mrs. Sabbag, though, the film
is also a reminder that she has become something of an outsider in her
own country. Although she frequently visited Lebanon to film during the
civil war, she has kept a home in
Paris since she moved here to study
cinema in 1972. Furthermore, while
her documentary "Nos Guerres Imprudentes" and her two previous
dramatic feature films, "Écrans de
Sable" and "Les Infidèles," dealt
with Middle Eastern subjects, they
have only been seen in France and at
film festivals.
Yet if her family and career are in
France, her heart is still in Lebanon,
she said. Before flying to New York
for Wednesday's screening of her
movie, she spent a week in southern
Lebanon filming the aftermath of the
Israeli withdrawal.
"I've been following a woman who
for 10 years was a prisoner of the
South Lebanon Army," she said.
"I'm thinking of making a documentary about her."
