Civilisées

When the civil war broke out in the Lebanon in 1973, many Lebanese fled to Europe. They deserted their beautiful houses with all their possessions and left their servants, often immigrants, to look after their goods and chattels. Film-maker Randa Chahal Sabbag was twenty at the time. She was forty before it was all over. Her experiences of the time in between form the basis for Civilisées. She tells the story of those who stayed behind, a mixed bunch of individuals who survive in a suburb of Beirut. A young woman who comes to visit her family, a servant who has chained up two Syrians in his cellar because his own son is in jail, two prostitutes who share an apartment and keep quarrelling with their Sri-Lankan neighbours, a sniper looking for a target, a Christian girl who falls in love with a Moslem soldier. The war is all around them: bombs, funerals, mourning, anarchy and fights. But Sabbag also wanted to show a different side: life goes on in spite of all that. She wanted to show the people as she got to know them in the war: cruel, funny, lively and above all human. This brightly coloured palette of events and characters expresses many faces of a war. They all have their own stories and Sabbag gives them space, without condemning them but also without pity; it was their own war, a war that they made and fought themselves.