“What can the ghosts of protests past tell us?” asks an
intertitle in Mary Jirmanus
Saba‘s Shuour Akbar Min al-Hob (A Feeling Greater Than
Love), which won the FIPRESCI
(the international film critics’ association) jury award in
Berlinale’s edgy Forum
section this week. The 99-minute film — which took the Lebanese writer-director
almost seven years to make and was edited by Egyptian editor Louly
Seif — mixes interviews, archival footage and clips from Lebanese
militant films to tell the story of two strikes, in a southern
Lebanon tobacco company and at Beirut’s Gandour biscuit factory, in
the early 1970s. Due to their failure and that of the larger
revolutionary movement surrounding them, as well as the start of the
Lebanese civil war in 1975, they are largely absent from the
country’s collective memory.
The 33-year-old filmmaker, who studied social studies and
geography in the US before spending several years in Latin America as
an organizer of agricultural laborers and as a community television
producer, decided to make the film after discovering more about
Lebanon’s 1972 uprising and the revolution it almost launched. In
relation to the region’s 2011 uprisings, it prompted her to ask:
Are we repeating the same gestures, do they bring us closer to
justice and equality, and what can we do with a desire for
change and unity now?
Placing itself in Lebanon’s strong tradition of militant
filmmaking, Saba’s film opens avenues for contemplation on the
collective failure of the left in Lebanon by juxtaposing footage from
works by 1970s activist-filmmakers, such Christian Ghazi and Maroun
Baghdadi, with present-day footage of workers who took part in the
strikes leading quiet lives in places where not much has changed 40
years later. Farmers pick leaves to sell them to the tobacco company,
which still has a monopoly, and when she takes us to the Gandour
factory through an old militant film, we realize through a cut to the
same location that it is where the Mall of Beirut now stands.
Much of A Feeling Greater than Love is devoted to an
array of narratives about Fatima Khaweja, a teenaged martyr of the
strike whose story, as someone born in the tobacco-producing south
who migrated to work at the Gandour factory, was used for political
gain by the Communist Party and the more pragmatic Organization for
Communist Action. Saba speaks to members of the party and Fatima’s
colleagues, family and neighbors, and everyone speaks differently of
her involvement in the strike, from an account of her being a
powerful party member to not even having ever worked at the factory.
This multiplicity, while creating some confusion while viewing the
film, enabled Saba to avoid romanticizing Fatima and point to larger
questions on appropriation of the memories of martyrs, which is where
the film triumphs.
Like another recent “hybrid documentary” concerned with labor
strikes, Out
on the Street (2015) by Egyptian filmmakers Jasmina Metwaly
and Philip Rizk, Saba also uses re-enactment in her multi-layered
film. An older man drives around present-day Southern Lebanon in an
old Mercedes, using a megaphone to call on passersby not to accept
the status quo, to revolt and join the strike at the tobacco factory.
But no one even flinches at the sight of his solitary protest.
A Feeling Greater Than Love is also a feminist film. Saba
sought out women who were involved and many appear in the
documentary, some anonymously. These characters speak of their
mobilization work, but also at times of their imposed role of
sandwich-makers for the protests. A major character is Nadine, an
aristocrat involved in the Organization for Communist Action, helping
rally the female factory workers, who then moved to France at the
war’s outbreak. In a fascinating scene, Saba brings her together
with several of the other 1970s activists she has been interviewing
to reflect on their dreams at the time, the reality now and where
they went wrong. “It’s not the intellectuals who will have the
answers,” Nadine says. “If anyone will know how to get out of the
situation we’re in now, it’s the workers who will come up with
the solution.”
By bringing her own texts and questions into the film, Saba
poetically creates a charged, personal account in which Lebanon’s
history is a microcosm of the whole region’s fate. As countries
that led the 2011 uprisings have fallen into civil war or deep social
and political divides, A Feeling Greater Than Love is as a
document for urgent reflection on how to avoid the errors of the past
— as well as on what cinema’s role can be. Its title captures a
feeling that many who participated in protests or strikes will relate
to, but we are left to wonder whether that feeling is enough to
create real change.
The members of the FIPRESCI jury, Sasja Koetsier, Rasha Hosny and
Rüdiger Suchsland, wrote of Saba’s film: “Documentary cinema at
its best, this is exciting, thrilling, encouraging,” and that:
“Full of melancholia, it is yet full of hope, the longing for a
better future.” Personally I don’t see the film as hopeful, but
as an important contribution to the conversation about what better
alternatives might be.
This article was
first published by MadaMasr,
an independent, progressive media platform in Cairo on February 21,
2017.
