Fi al bahti ‘an Shaïma

The film opens with the famous words of Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream, that one day, this nation will know its creed.’ The film-maker quotes this statement because he fears that the Gulf War may make that dream even more difficult to realise. In order to keep it alive, he departs for Iraq. In Baghdad he goes in search of a girl whose face he has seen on television. She was filmed in the El-Amyria neighbourhood and mourned the slaughter in a shelter filled with civilians — men, women and children. The local inhabitants do not recognise her on the indistinct photo taken from the TV picture. It is assumed she was a relative of one of the victims and that she had come a long way to attend the funeral. Her name might have been Shaïma, but also Zahra or Baida, ordinary names for ordinary people.Towards the end of the trip, the boy Khaled, who miraculously survived the slaughter but who lost his brother, took the place of the missing girl. The disaster evokes memories of other disasters, the same gestures of mourning can be seen on archive footage from Beirut, Sabra, Chatila, Cyprus or Chile. They form part of the collective memory of the dispossessed whose fate it is to go from one war to the next, as a result of the whims of rulers.