“Fida grew up during the war in Beirut in the 1980s, in the middle of the ‘red hell’ that her grandmother always told her about. The trivialization of death made her doubt the value of life and the meaning of this never-ending war that resembled so many others.”
This is the description of the new film by director Sylvie Ballyot Green Linewhich celebrated its world premiere this week in the international competition at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.
In this documentary about the Lebanese Civil War, Fida uses miniature figures and models to meet militiamen and eyewitnesses to confront her childhood experiences when, at the age of 10, she witnessed a battle opposite her school that killed 100 people. Fida is Elfida “Fida” Bizri, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film with Ballyot.
The protagonist and director, along with editor Charlotte Tourrès and producer Céline Loiseau, met with film fans and the press in the picturesque Swiss town of Locarno to talk about their film and the story behind it. You can watch a trailer here on the Locarno Festival website.
“The idea itself, the desire, actually came about a long time ago,” said Ballyot. “I have known Elfida for 20 years. I met her shortly after the war in 2006, the last major 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 border 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, fascinated me.”
She felt at the time that she could play a role as a director in telling this story and bringing a deeper truth to light, but she didn’t take action immediately. “Years later, much later, I wanted to start writing something,” the filmmaker explained. “It was originally a full-length feature film, but it couldn’t be made due to financial reasons, etc.”
But that was a stroke of luck, she argued. “Since I was almost lucky to make this feature film, I had to do it with my own means. So I started creating scenes with small characters based on what Fida had told me about her past, her childhood – little things.” When she showed her the characters, “I understood that this little character that you see in the film had already had a very cathartic effect on her,” Ballyot concluded.
“Green Line”
Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival
Bizri recounted how she reacted to the suggestion of making a film. “Sylvie talked to me about making a film. I didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but I wanted to be nice. So I said, ‘Yes, if you want, OK, why not,'” she recalled. “But I didn’t see myself in the cinema at all, so I didn’t understand what that meant. If I had known what I know today, I would certainly have been afraid to do all that.”
Ballyot first asked Bizri to tell her life story so she could recreate scenes with the characters. “When she first showed me, in an animated sequence with little characters, a painful event that I had experienced when I was 22 and that is not in the film today, it was really disturbing for me,” Bizri said. “Because for me and my painful memory – I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone when they don’t understand what’s happening to them when they remember later – I remembered fixed, frozen images and not sequences at all.”
She continues: “So, I remembered a frozen image: I was standing. Another frozen image: I was lying on the ground. But in between I had no image. My memory was very fragmentary.” This also meant that she did not initially find the sequences created by Ballyot to be accurate. “At first I said: ‘No, that’s not it.’ Because I don’t remember falling. And she made me fall, for example (in the film sequence).”
Bizri added: “So she filled in the gaps between the images I had in my head. And I found that both disturbing and very restorative – because I was no longer held captive by frozen images. And that was very important.”
Because the film was shot in several phases, she had to deal with even more horrors. “When Sylvie suggested that I visit the militia in the second phase, it scared me a lot because I didn’t want to open that box of memories and visit them and talk to them,” Bizri recalls. “But at the same time, I said to myself, if looking at the characters has this positive side, maybe it can do that for others too. And maybe that can open doors.”
Still, it wasn’t easy to talk to the fighters, witnesses and various people from the neighborhood. “They are used to confrontation. But what worked was that I didn’t confront them, but was interested in what they had to say,” Bizri said. “At first they didn’t understand my approach, because generally we come to them to demand accountability. But I just wanted to understand them. That made it easier.”
“Green Line”
Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival
