The decade that changed Lebanese film forever

The Lebanese cinema of the 1990s was defined as much by absence as by creation. The civil war had ended, but the industry emerged into a country where theaters had closed, production networks had collapsed, and public support for filmmaking was virtually nonexistent. While Lebanon was rebuilding its roads, businesses, and skyline, cinema was left to reconstruct itself from fragments. A new generation of filmmakers began documenting a society grappling with memory, loss, and identity. The decade would produce a handful of films, but it laid the foundations for the modern Lebanese cinema that would later earn international acclaim.

An industry with no industry

Following the end of the civil war in 1990, the film industry confronted a landscape of destroyed infrastructure, financial constraints, and minimal domestic production. Financing of film production in this period was mainly dependent on foreign support, both European and from the Lebanese diaspora. A Lebanese film in the 1990s was, almost by definition, a film made with French money, often shot by a director who had spent the war years in Paris and was now returning, camera in hand, to a city they barely recognized.

What did grow, almost in spite of the production drought, was education. By the mid-1990s, six of Beirut's universities were offering degrees in cinema and television, attracting an influx of students from Arab countries who chose to receive some or all of their media training in Lebanon. The decade was seeding a generation before that generation had anywhere to put its films.

Baghdadi's last decade

Maroun Baghdadi entered the 1990s as the most internationally recognized Lebanese director alive, and he did not live to see its end. His film Hors la vie (1991) earned the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, a story, drawn from the period's real hostage crises, about Out of Life centering on Western journalists being taken hostage. It was Baghdadi doing what he had always done: refusing the war a clean political reading, insisting instead on the people caught inside its machinery.

He did not get to develop whatever came next. Maroun Baghdadi died on December 10, 1993, in Beirut. The image is almost too literal: a filmmaker who survived fifteen years of shelling killed by ordinary postwar infrastructure, by a building that hadn't been maintained. Lebanese cinema lost its central figure at the exact moment it most needed someone to lead it into the postwar.

Saab's reckoning with rubble

Jocelyne Saab, who had filmed Beirut under siege in 1982, returned to the wreckage with different questions. Films made after the war had a common theme of returning to the war setting and dealing with trauma common to post-conflict societies, Jocelyne Saab's experimental film, Once Upon a Time in Beirut, examined the destruction that was left after the war. Where her earlier work had been urgent reportage, made under fire, this was something closer to archaeology: sifting the physical remains of a city to understand what kind of memory could survive them. The shift in form, from documentary urgency to essayistic reflection, mirrors the shift the whole industry was making, from describing violence as it happened to figuring out how to live with what it had left behind.

The film nobody expected

Nothing in the decade mattered more, commercially or symbolically, than a debut feature from a man who had spent the war years as Quentin Tarantino's camera assistant. Ziad Doueiri, born in 1963, left Lebanon at eighteen during the civil war to study in the US, and first gained notice working under Tarantino as camera assistant on Jackie Brown, From Dusk Till Dawn, Pulp Fiction, and Reservoir Dogs. In 1998 he returned to direct West Beirut, a semi-autobiographical account of his own adolescence as the war began.

In April 1975, a young Lebanese boy named Tarek witnesses a massacre of Palestinians by the Phalangists. Shortly thereafter, the Lebanese Civil War breaks out; Beirut is partitioned along a line separating the Muslim-Christian mixed West Beirut from the quasi-Christian East Beirut. Tarek is in high school, making Super 8 movies with his friend Omar. At first the war is a lark, school has closed, the violence is fascinating, getting from West to East is a game. The film tracks the slow curdling of that adventure into genuine danger, as Tarek spends time with May, a Christian girl orphaned and living in his building, and the war moves inexorably from adventure to tragedy.

What made the film a landmark wasn't only its craft, though critics praised its loose, handheld, French New Wave-influenced style. It was the absence of a thesis. The film has absolutely no political agenda to push; it is purely about the characters and about how normal citizens are affected by guerrilla warfare. Lebanese audiences, who had largely stayed away from the decade's war-themed festival films, came to this one. West Beirut was a local and international hit, the first Lebanese film, and the first Arabic-language film, to have general release in America. It was the first Lebanese film that the post-war generation in Lebanon actually saw in cinemas, and historian Lina Khatib would later call it the start of a renaissance.

An ecosystem

By decade's end, something resembling infrastructure was forming outside the state's reach entirely. With no government initiatives or public-sector support for cinema in Lebanon, the private sector, created an ecosystem for independent film production, dependent on regional funding and international co-productions, especially from Europe. It was an unglamorous, improvised solution to an unglamorous, improvised decade. A handful of producers, film-school graduates, and directors who had grown up amid the war simply kept working, kept applying for European grants, kept making films nobody had told them they were allowed to make. By 1998, one of those films finally reached the audience the rest of the decade had been missing, proof that the silence after the war could, eventually, be filmed too.