Filming fragmented spaces in the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to try to understand how the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars have been represented when it comes to filming the space in which these wars unfolded. Since both wars share a number of actors (the Syrian government, the Hezbollah), and, to some extent, the same space, our goal is to see if these wars share also a common grammar when it comes to the representation of space, and from this, possibly common narrative lines, along which our understanding of the conflicts are modelled (Harb and Matar 2013), drawing on a common visual culture (Khatib 2013, Gruber and Haubolle 2013) and a common cinematographic imagery to represent two different conflicts.

The Lebanese civil war has been the core subject of Lebanese cinema since the 1980s (Khatib 2008), and what is left of Syrian cinema appears to follow the same path about the country’s civil war. In addition to these works of fiction or semi-fiction (Maroun Baghdadi, Ossama Mohammad), one has to take into account the various documentaries that have been shot in these countries during the civil wars, as they lay the basis of the narratives on which fiction is made, and there is a constant dialogue in these films between nonfiction and fiction, with the use of extremely powerful symbols, and a search in both case to make sense out of the images of the war. Moreover, the memory of the Lebanese civil war and of its filmed images are very much present when it comes to the Syrian civil war, and this creates a pool of shared references between the film directors and their audience in their quest to give a sense to the ongoing war.

In both cases, the civil war appears to have led to a fragmentation of the represented space, following the fragmentation of the civil and state space (Buhaug and Gates 2002), and to the establishment of a new geography on the screen. Several main themes are articulated in this regard, which are not limited to the creation of new borders or no man’s land on the map. Through the camera, filmmakers are able to explain how they live the new relation to space that has been created, in the most intimate way. This relation can be summed up around a few themes. Of course, the main one is the fragmentation of the territory, the destruction of the ancient ways of living the space, linked to the appearance of forbidden or abandoned territories (Calargé and Gueydan-Turek2014), to the point that some places entirely disappear of the representation, while some other gain a particular predominance, as they become symbolic of the civil war. On the other hand, the space appears to be divided between relatively safe spaces, and dangerous ones, a question which is at the core of how

the civil war is lived, and which is strongly linked to the notions of “in” and “out”, from the most intimate standpoint, that is the family home, to the most general one, linking it to the question of exile and forced migrations (Davenport, Moore and Poe 2003, Knudsen 2014), building space not along surfaces, but along lines of safety, inside and outside the country, that is the representation of a reticular and linear space, in response to the fragmentation of the state. The last theme is the transformation of the very notion of space : space is transformed to the point that it becomes irrelevant, and is itself engulfed in the civil war : this appears particularly in the case of the disappearances of people, which have been a major feature of both civil wars.

New territories and the transformation of space

The most obvious consequence of the Lebanese and Syrian civil wars on screen has been the transformation of the public space, with the formation of new territories, which replace the original space under state control, and changes the civil space in which people coexist, lead their lives and have made theirs. In the case of Lebanon, this is exemplified by one of the first sequences of West-Beirut (Doueiri 1998) : while in the opening sequence the young hero made a mess of his French school by replacing the French anthem with the Lebanese one, in the following sequence, after the war has broken out, he is unable to go to school as it is on the other side of Beirut, beyond the demarcation line. At the same time, his parents struggle to understand on which side of Beirut they are, not really knowing at the beginning of the war where are these new “East” and “West”, that replace the neighborhood they know of Hamra, Achrafiyeh, Tariq Jdideh… (Khatib 2008, Davie 1997)

Beirut’s line of demarcation was a symbol powerful enough to be put at the core of a movie shot during the war itself : Beirut, the encounter (Borhane Alaouié 1981), narrating the attempts of two lovers to meet, while they are separated by this new border, which proves to be impossible to cross, despite their efforts. What was originally a common and shared space, which the film exemplifies by evoking the character of Yussef Bey Karam (Chaker 1996), a figure of national unity. Volker Schlöndorff, when filming Die Fälschung, acknowledged the importance of this new feature in the urban landscape by placing most of the action of his film precisely along the line of demarcation, where the hero and his acquaintances live, and which he crosses multiple times, just in the same way that he would cross a border, being a foreign journalist.

The same situation appears in the case of the Syrian civil war, as can be exemplified by the Ossama Mohammad’s Silvered water (2014) which opposes dramatically the conquest of the civil space by the peaceful demonstrations that occurred just before the civil war, and the creation of new boundaries within this newly conquered space by the civil war. Along these boundaries, people tend to behave in the same way the Lebanese did in Alaouié ou Doueiri’s movies. Mohammad shows, as Schlöndorff did, the importance of the no man’s

land, the spaces that are exposed to sniper fire, and, to some extent, as did Doueiri, the new spaces of liberty for the children that the destruction offers to children. He follows a young boy, who tends to react in the same way that the children in West-Beirut did, by creating new spaces of his own, among the deserted ruins, where the adults won’t follow him.

On a more tragic level, borders are also at the core of the documentary The Shebabs of Yarmuk (Salvatori-Sinz 2015). The film follows a group of young Palestinian artists from the Yarmuk refugee camp dear Damascus in their long and difficult endeavors to try to go abroad to study or make a living, just before the revolution. But, as the civil war begins, they have to deal with new borders, and the refugee camp, while being completely integrated in Damascus suburbs, becomes a new border, as they are trapped between the regime forces and the Free Syrian Army. What used to be the limit of the camp becomes a frontline, a boundary that they can cross only at the risk of their lives, and the camp itself appears in the end as another no man’s land, after having been utterly destroyed during the fighting, annihilating in the process the lives they had made for themselves. Thus, the surviving shebabs become once more refugees, in the same way the characters of The encounter did, emigrating or surviving among the rubbles.

The theme of the divided city is of course central in the discourse about the Lebanese civil war, in which Beirut plays a key-role. People discover the division of the city, or are confined on one side of it, as in Stray Bullet(Hachem 2010), In the battlefield (Arbid 2004), Nahla (Beloufa 1979), or Incendies (Villeneuve 2010), when they discover they are in danger if they leave a precise area (Khatib 2008). This notion is important enough to have made its way in the action movies that place in Beirut during the civil war, such as Navy Seals (Teague 1990) and The Delta Force (Golan 1986), which take into their narrative the idea of crossing the line of demarcation as a key figure of the represented space (Jeffords 1994, Gimello-Mesplomb 2007, Khatib 2013)

The same can be said about Syria, with Aleppo replacing Beirut in the narrative. A great part of the documentaries that are being filmed about the Syrian civil war are shot mainly in Aleppo, particularly along the frontline between regime forces and the the various rebel brigades. This appears in Vice News’s compilation Ground Zero Syria (King 2013), which can be linked to other documentaries by the same media : A city left in ruins, the battle for Aleppo, Ghosts of Aleppo and Al-Jazeera’s Aleppo, notes from the dark Prezdlacki and Szumowski 2014), all of which document the growing distress of the rebels and the growth of jihadi groups among them. Even Deraa, at the end of Ground Zero Syria is presented along the same lines, as a divided city, with the frontlines and the new boundaries running amidst the buildings. To some extent, it can be argued that Aleppo has replaced Beirut in the representation of the war, as the main symbolic space, with its demarcation lines, and the internalization of these lines (Davie 1992), making the divided city the main character of the war as it appears on screen, the municipal building of Aleppo replacing the Holiday Inn of Beirut as a key visual symbol.

On the other hand, some parts of the country appear extremely rarely on screen : in Lebanon, most of the movies that have been made take place in Beirut, or on its immediate outskirts. It is quite rare when a documentary, such as Pity the nation Charles Glass’s Lebanon (Glass 1989) mentions the war in Tripoli or Zghorta. Volker Schlöndorff mentions the fights at Tell el-Zaatar and Damur, and a few documentaries mention the battles in Mount Lebanon, as does Georges Chamchoum in Lebanon why ? (1977) but Beirut remains the main issue, as signifies Jean Chamoun, making the name of the city the emblem of the whole war with War generation Beirut (1988), even if some characters of Maroun Baghdadi’s Little wars (1982) were deeply rooted in the countryside.

In Syria, such a transformation of the represented map can also be noted with the importance of a few cities, Aleppo, Homs and Deraa above all, with Kobane being apart, as are the cities under ISIS control, such as Raqqa, from which images are rare and prized ( el-Ali 2015). On the other hand, Damascus has nearly disappeared from the screen since the beginning of the civil war, when even Ladder to Damascus (Malas 2013) chooses to show very little of the city, as it is now under control of the regime after the demonstrations of 2011. In the same way, the Jabal al-Druze is similarly absent from the screen for instance, drawing a map of the war that is organized around focal symbolic points, and making the rest of the country a terra incognita.

An effect of this fragmentation of the territory on screen has been the dislocation of the civil war itself, following the place where it is waged, and which enemies are pitted against each other. In the case of Lebanon, the civil war appears under a very different light when it deals with the South of the country, which becomes an autonomous represented space, following its partition from the rest of the country after the Israeli invasion of 1982. This opened the way to a cinema of resistance in the South, which is part of the cinema of the civil war, but has a much more positive and patriotic tone, as the South, while separated from the rest of the country, has been reimagined and represented as a national cause (Harb 2011, Daudelin 2013, Mermier 2010, Volk 2010). This is the case in Roger Assaf’s Ma’raka (1985), Leyla Assaf-Tengroth’s Martyrs (1988), and with al-Manar’s two-season series Al-Ghaliboun, depicting the operations of the Islamic Resistance against Israel during the 80s (al-Manar 2011-2012), among others. Documentaries followed the same, as did for instance the militant piece of Maroun Bagdadi The story of a village and a war (1978). Especially in al-Manar’s series, this war is almost completely distinguished from the civil war, only a few films like Incendies making a link between this war and the rest of the territory (Pelletier 2015, Fisher 2012).

The Syrian civil war seems to follow the same path, with films about the fights between the rebels and the regime forces being to some extent separated from the ones about the fight between the rebels or the regime and ISIS. The fights are rarely presented as occurring at the same time and following the same dynamic. At most, as in Silvered waters, people are presented as being caught between the regime and ISIS. Vice News made two series of documentaries about Syria: one about the fights between the rebels and Assad’s

forces, and one about ISIS (The Islamic State 2014). In the same way, Daech, naissance d’un Etat terroriste (Fritel, 2014), tends to separate its battles from the rest of the Syrian civil war. As both civil war unfolded, they appear on screen as at least two distinct wars in each case, if not a plurality of Little wars (1982) that fragment the space, and become fragmented themselves.

The notions of “inside” and “outside”

If new boundaries and borders appear, and play an important part in the spatialization of the war on screen, the way the war influences how people deal with the space is also represented in a much more intimate way. This a primarily to do with the notion of “in”, representing a theorically safe and stable space, and “out”, understood as a space of danger, but this dichotomy can also be transformed by the civil war.

Most Lebanese movies about the civil war are dramas unfolding among a family, and the film is usually set in their home or following them in spaces that they consider to be safe. Almost all the sequences of In the battlefields are set at home, as they are in Stray Bullet, and the kids in West Beirut are warned time and again against going out in dangerous areas. The Shelter (Hajjar 1980) is almost entirely set in the shelter of a neighborhood where people feel safe, as the street is under sniper fire. In the same way, symbolically, the heroin of Incendies sets on her dangerous journey through the civil war as she is thrown out of the house for dating a potential enemy, and her life becomes one of survival, as she is outside, exposed to danger. When she evokes symbolically the civil war, Nadine Labaki opposes the village, seen as a closed unity, even with its troubles and feuds (Where do we go now? 2011) to the menacing outside world.

Still, this safety of the home is put into question by the civil war, with its intimacy (Bougarel 2008, de Clerck 2009, Haugbolle 2005, 2010) that puts into question the usual appeasing role of the home (Cabanes and Piketty 2015). The militiamen and the killers may be former neighbors, friends, or even family (West Beirut, the Shelter, Nahla, Stray Bullet Incendies) as in Kfarmatta forbidden village (Mounayar 2010), and the home is no longer as safe as it used to be. In this regard, cinema about the civil war may use the house as a metaphor of the destruction of the country, as the family dissolves in the civil war, as it does In the Battlefield, and being “inside” becomes sometimes as dangerous as being “outside”. Hence, the decomposition of the private space serves as a metaphor of the civil war.

The same dichotomy appears in the narratives of the Syrian civil war. This is the case with Ladder to Damascus, of which most takes place in a residence for artists. There, the heroes discuss, make plans, and share their ideas about the ongoing situation, in a relatively safe haven. But the director makes the “outside” be present through the sounds of the revolution, and some blurry images that are projected on a pool in this residence. The sounds are those of the demonstrations and of their repression in 2011. With this dramatic effect, the director opposes the relative safety of the home, with the violence of the outside

world on the civil space just conquered by the demonstrations. Being outside is at the same time a way to participate more actively in the debates, but it is also a very dangerous place, one that progressively encircles the house and its inhabitants.

The Shebabs of Yarmuk tells a parallel story, that of the refugee camp as a hated place for the young artists who want to work on a bigger scene, but I the same time, a safe haven at the beginning of the civil war, when it welcomed refugees from the nearby neighborhoods that had been destroyed (Napolitano 2012). Then, the camp became a deadly trap, and one of the artists is killed just outside of it, as the Palestinians and other refugees are blocked inside the camp and besieged, as they had been in Lebanon during the civil war in the Quarantina, Tell-el-Zaatar, Sabra and Chatila, with films mentioning this, as Die Fälschüng, Incendies, Gate of the Sun (Nasrallah 2004), Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) (Raz 2010, 2011, Mansfield 2010, Bashkin 2009) (Mouawad 2009, Haugbolle 2011), as did documentaries (Dindo’s Genet à Chatila 2000). On a more general scale, Silvered water opposes in the same way the “inside” as a safe place to the “outside” with its snipers, but insists on the frailty of the “inside” that can be destroyed at any moment by a shell or a bomb.

The notions of “inside” and “outside” can be also interpreted by film directors in a different way, that is “inside” the country or “outside” of it. This is a crucial theme when it comes to the apprehension of the space in both civil war narratives, as they led to a huge amount of forced migrations, which in turn put their mark on the narratives of the conflicts (Faour, Velut, Verdeil 2007, Kasparian and Baudoin 1995, Beydoun 1993, Haugbolle 2005 about Lebanon, Geisser 2013, Roussel 2014, Meier 2014, Cimino 2014, Knudsen 2014 about Syria, among others). In films, these narratives during the Lebanese civil war, about the need to flee the country, for those who can, but this can also linked to the guilt of abandoning the country in its time of greatest need (Letter from a time of exile Alaouié 1989), which can be an obstacle to communication when people who left the country return after the war : when trying to film about the war after its end, Danielle Arbid faces this with difficulty in Seule avec la guerre (1999). On the other hand, being outside of the country can be considered as a way to escape the madness of a war that the characters of the movies do not understand or reject : this also appears in Lettre d’un temps d’exil, from different narrators, and it is one of the core questions of Nahla, Beirut the encounter, and Incendies. Especially, this idea of new opportunities abroad, while keeping a strong link to Lebanon is the main theme of Zozo (Fares 2005), where the young orphan hero recreates a new life with his grandparents in the safety of Sweden.

The Syrian civil war follows the same path, with A Syrian Love Story (Mc Allister 2015) that follows over five years a Syrian family from the beginning of the revolution to 2015, first in Damascus, then, as they become refugees, in Lebanon, France and Turkey. The films documents the hopes of 2011, but it as well illustrates the tensions within the family, as the mother, a political activist, cannot bear to be away from the revolution, and in the end leaves her family to work with the Syrian opposition in Turkey. She demonstrates the same

guilt as what was seen in the movies about Lebanon, a kind of guilt that the Shebabs from Yarmouk who fled to France also bear, as does Oussama Mohammad, when he starts filming Silvered water. The Syrian peculiarity in this regard is the massive number of refugees, who at the same time look for a safe haven outside of the country, and face despair on the borders of Syria, as shown by A requiem for Syrian refugees (Wolf 2014). Linked to guilt of fleeing the country in a time of need is the fact that being “outside” appears to some extent as being trapped in a nowhere place, far from one’s identity, and facing the difficulty to build a new one in exile.

This relation to the outside is furthermore complicated by the fact that war narratives present the conflict as following the characters when they leave the country. This is the case with A Syrian love story, where the family cell breaks gradually apart as the civil war unfolds, and the decomposition of the country is closely matched by the family members become estranged to one another. In this regard, the Syrian civil war appears as following a theme about exile that was explored by the Lebanese civil war narratives. One of the characters from Letter from a time of exile appears as such, wondering in the Paris subway how a Lebanese subway would even foster the civil war, as it would allow more battles. Despite having fled from the war, this character appears to be still bearing its marks. Maroun Bagdadi explored this theme in more depth with The veiled man (1987), where he follows a humanitarian worker who witnessed atrocities during the war, fled from it, but in the same time, tries to exact revenge on the people who committed this massacre. Here, Badgadi, beyond the particular distress of his hero who cannot get over his trauma, identifies the weight of the Lebanese diaspora during the civil war, and its implication in it (Picard 2005, Hourani 2010). Being “outside” of the country does not mean being safe, as the war follows the characters and the narratives take into account the fact that even very far from the country at war, the war itself can destroy lives. The same can be said about Incendies where the heroin sees her whole world collapse when she recognizes in Canada the man that tortured her during the civil war, leading her children to travel back to post-war Lebanon to understand what happened to their mother, as it is in this “inside” that they can find answers.

Symbols and places of nowhere

In relation to space, one more dimension needs to be studied about the Lebanese and Syrian civil wars, which is the abolition of space, or its transformation into a symbolic place, that Is the “place of war”.

When she tried to understand the civil war, Danielle Arbid, in Seule avec la guerre, found it difficult to find places that she can relate to the war, beyond the bullet-ridden walls of Beirut city centre which were in the process of being destroyed in 1999. She films herself following deputies and ministers asking where and when a memorial will be erected about

the civil war, to no answer but the national cause of the liberation of the South 1. She has t follow former militiamen or taxi driver to find places that they claim are linked to the civil war, but are completely abandoned. And she knocks on every door around Tell-el-Zaatar to no avail, precisely where some of the most terrible battles of the civil war were fought. The camp, as well as its remembrance, has been completely erased, it is a non-space. The same question of the disappearance of the space of war appears in fiction with Around the pink house (Hadjithomas and Joreige 1999), filmed at the same time as Arbid’s documentary, when the most important traces of the civil war were about to disappear under the reconstruction, with all the questions that such remains left (Nagel 2002, Halaf and Khoury 1993, Harb 2000, Schmid 2006, Genberg 2002)

Where this notion of non-space has been the more thoroughly explored about the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars is in relation to the disappearance of people, during, and in the Lebanese case, after the war. These people can be hostages, prisoners, taken by a rival militia, by one of the countries that intervene in the civil war, or just simple citizens whose disappearance lacks explanation, and can remain missing for years (Haugbolle 2005, Chouet 2005). Charles Glass, himself a former hostage, paved the way for this theme in Pity the nation, insisting on this notion of being trapped in a space that does not exist. This was the central theme of Bagdadi’s Out of life (1991), about a journalist taken hostage by a militia, which tries to break him, and in the end releases him with no reason. Other directors then followed this lead, with Bhij Hojeij’s Chatti ya dini (2010) Joana Hadjithomas and Khalid Joreige’s A perfect day (2005), and Dima el-Horr’s Koul youm eid (2009). All thses movies deal with people who have vanished from the surface of the earth during the civil war, never to be heard of again. They are a presence for their loved ones, most of them are probably dead or have been tortured, but above all, they are in a non-space.

From a more militant standpoint, the same theme appears in the Syrian civil war, with the massive disappearance of people, either arrested by the regime, or by the various militas, and who are announced dead later, as one of the Shebabs of Yarmouk. This appears in the short movie Codename Caesar (Alrachid 2014), and in the documentary Syrie, témoins à charge (Joulie and Le Caisne 2016), focused on the people denouncing the war crimes in Syria, and especially on Cesar, who smuggled out of Syria thousands of pictures of people killed in the regime’s prisons (Le Caisne 2015). These films try to identify these spaces that officially do not exist, and strive to put them back on the map. The narrative here is of an ongoing struggle against the abolition of space that these disappearances represent, and to preserve the very idea of space against its abolition.

This is even more important in the Syrian case, as the civil war has led to the creation of false places that distort the war narrative, and the endeavors of these witnesses to maintain the reality of people in space. This is exemplified by the documentary a gay girl in

1 Arman’s monument near the Lebanese Defence Ministry cannot be taken into account, as it was a gift from Arman to Lebanon, not a local initiative http://www.armanstudio.com/fernandez-arman-espoir_de_paix-1075-3-74-fr.html last checked 4/6/2014. field research, 1996 et 2000

Damascus : the Amina profile (Deraspe 2015). The cyberspace in itself added to the relation of people to the space in the Syrian civil war, especially through the work of these witnesses. But this documentary focuses on a false witness, a so-called Damascene blogger sharing her thoughts about the Syrian revolution, whose pretended arrest led to an international campaign for her release, but who turned out to be a straight American man (Cardell and Maguire 2015, Frost-Arnold 2014, Ramji 2015). In this particular context, beyond the “place of nowhere” that Amina was supposedly trapped in lies the false space. As Waltz with Bashir explored in its own ways, in these wars common references such as time, truth and space become uncertain.

If not false, this abolition of space has another meaning in the war narratives that of a space that is lost, out of time, and with no particular meaning other than being the “space of war”. This characterization was already present in 80’s action movies set in Lebanon, where the country’s main characteristic was that of being at war (Harb and Matar 2013, Khatib 2013), but this theme has been explored in more depth by Dima al-Horr, with her characters wandering in the desert as an unidentified conflict looms on the horizon, an idea that was brought to its purest form by Ghassan Salhab’s The valley (2014), using the theme of being lost in a space that has become estranged already explored by Danielle Arbid’s A lost man (2007). In these films, the space becomes a nowhere land, that the war has estranged to the people who live in it, some of them having lost their memories, and it space becomes an abstract concept, which has lost its meaning.

This notion is also present in the Israeli movies about Lebanon that are Beaufort (Cedar 2007) and Lebanon (Maoz 2009). Samuel Maoz’s movie sees the war uniquely through the sights of the tank its hero is driving, and space loses all meaning. Places are impossible to identify, and the whole landscape is uniquely identified through its potential danger : the whole space is seen through the war prism that destroys and fragments it even more as it is only seen through a very symbolic tank sight (Crafti 2011). If Beaufort castle is clearly identified in Southern Lebanon, the narrative is also extremely symbolic, as it relies heavily on Dino Buzzati’s The Desert Steppe (1940), with its slow pace describing the life of a garrison far from its command center, waiting for the hypothetical attack of an invisible enemy. Here also, space is extremely symbolic, but identified with the looming war itself, as the transformation of the space by war is a part of the war narrative (Yosef 2011, Trbic 2007).

Conclusion

It appears that the civil war narratives of Lebanon and Syria are closely parallel, and it can be argued that to some extent, it seems that the Syrian war narrative has been heavily influenced by the cinematographic representations of the Lebanese civil war, from portrays of fighters, as in Vice News documentaries where rebel fighters speak in a way that closely resembles that of Maroun Bagdadi’s The most beautiful of all mothers (1978), to a common anguish about the abolition of space and time during the war. In this regard, the relation to

space appears particularly relevant as it allows to study common problematics and to see this parallelism in spite of the very important differences between these wars. One can argue that this hints at a common cinematographic culture among the directors and the public, which helps to make sense out of the war, but also can be problematic as the Syrian civil war is seen through lenses that are those of the Lebanese civil war. It may be possible that post-war Syrian narratives may in this respect be quite similar to the Lebanese ones when it will come to the evocation of space. That is, a space that, while being quite clearly recognizable, has lost its meaning and which bears, underneath, the traces of the war that weigh on the people, as Michel Kammoun’s Falafel (2006) shows.

Beyond this, the fragmentation of the space that occurred during the civil war has led to a new theme, that of the reconquest of space, of its reappropriation. Michel Aractingi’s Bosta (2005) made this question its main theme, and in this movie, travelling through post-war Lebanon becomes a way to assert the end of the war and the reunification of the country around common values. The space here has still a very symbolic meaning, but one of reconciliation. This may be what lies ahead of Syrian cinema, a question that it will have to face, and it will have to invent its own answer to it.

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Filmography

Alalouié Borhan Lettre d’un temps d’exil Dora Films 1989

Alaouié, Borhan : Beirut the encounter Ciné Libre 1981

Alrachid Abdullah Codename Caesar Alrachid 2014

Aractingi Michel Bosta Fantascope Production 2005

Arbid Danielle A lost man MK2 Productions 2007

Arbid Danielle In the battlefields Quo Vadis Cinéma 2004

Arbid Danielle Seule avec la guerre Movimento Production 1999

Assaf Roger Ma’raka El Hekawati Productions 1985

Assaf-Tengroth Leyla Martyrs Cadmos Production 1988

Bagdadi Maroun Out of life Galatée films 1991

Bagdadi Maroun The most beautiful of all mothers The Communist Action Organisation in Lebanon 1978

Bagdadi Maroun The story of a village and a war UN 1978

Bagdadi Maroun The veiled man CNC 1987

Baghdadi Maroun Little wars Lyric International 1982

Beloufa Farouk Nahla R.T.A 1979

Cedar Joseph Beaufort United King Films 2007

Chamchoum Georges Lebanon why ? Camera 9 1977

Chamoun Jean Khalil War generation Beirut Arab Film Distribution 1988

Deraspe Sophie A gay girl in Damascus : the Amina profile Esperamos Films 2015

Dindo Richard Genet à Chatila Les Films d’ici 2000

Doueiri, Ziad : West Beirut 38 Productions 1998

El-Ali Haya La rebelle de Raqqa France 24 2015

El-Horr Dima Koul youm Eid Ciné-Sud Promotion 2009

Fares Josef Zozo Memfis Films 2005

Folman Ari Waltz with Bashir Les Films d’ici 2008

Fritel Jérôme Daech naissance d’un Etat terroriste Arte 2014

Glass Charles Pity the nation, Charles Glass’s Lebanon BBC 1989

Golan Menahem The Delta Force Golan-Globus 1986

Hachem George Stray Bullet Abbout Productions 2010

Hadjithomas Joana and Joreige Khalil A perfect day About Productions 2005

Hadjithomas Joana and Joreige Khalil Around the pink house Mille et une productions 1999

Hajjar Rafic The Shelter Arab Film Distribution 1980

Hojeij Bahij Chatti ya dini Online Films 2010

Joulie Olivier and Le Caisne Garance Syrie témoins à charge France Télévision 2016

Kammoun Michel Falafel Ciné-Sud Promotion 2006

King Robert Ground Zero Syria Vice News 2013

Labaki Nadine Where do we go now? Les Films des Tournelles 2011

Malas Mohamed Ladder to Damascus Abbout Productions 2013

Maoz Samuel Lebanon Ariel Films 2009

Mc Allister Sean A Syrian love story 10 Ft Films 2015

Michal Przedlacki, Wojciech Szumowski Aleppo, notes from the dark TVN 2014

Mohammad, Ossama and Berdixan Wiam Silvered Water Les Films d’ici 2014

Mounayar Mirna Kfarmatta forbidden village MTV Lebanon 2010

Nasrallah Yousry Gate of the Sun Ognon Pictures 2004

Salhab Ghassan The Valley About Productions 2014

Salvatori-Sinz, Axel : The Shebabs of Yarmouk Dock 66 2015

Teague Lewis Navy Seals Orion Pictures 1990

Vice News A city left in ruins, the battle for Aleppo Vice News 2014

Vice News Ghosts of Aleppo Vice News 2014

Vice News The Islamic State Vice News 2014

Villeneuve Denis Incendies micro-scope 2010

Wolf Richard A requiem for Syrian refugees Lobodocs 2014