Afrasianet - Zahra Marei - In its premiere in Lebanon at the Arab Image Foundation/Clemenceau Gallery, the documentary "Like an Olive" was a positive shock to the audience. It did not have a path and left its four characters with emotional, humane and free national expression, and did not invent or direct attitudes, although its goal was to emotionally and humanly express people.
The four characters chosen from three generations are an old lady, the father of a middle-aged family, and a young woman and a young man who volunteer in the Civil Defense. The beautiful old Um Suhail remains a bearer in the folds of her age, her wrinkles the pulse of the earth and the smell of her olives, and the nurseries she tobacco.
She is forcibly removed from her lungs. She leaves them in the olive yard she longs for. She says to the camera, "What do you want me to do?" and she reveals that she is still a producer who grows smoke pipes and helps her children with their provisions.
To this attractive humane and southern model, Lakhdar, the head of a displaced family from the southern suburbs to the Corniche of the sea in Beirut, had his own concerns and issues, both private and public, far from the pattern of complaint. A man who expresses himself poetically and asks about the future, without committing a useful sentence from here or there. "The border of the sea and not Shayfu." "Do you imagine that your house becomes ashes?" and with it the yeast of marriage and the yeast of life. A man who presents A humane cooperative model in similar circumstances. He shares the caravan he has received with others who spend the night in their cars.
The story of the young man and woman, each on his own, sums up the horrors of wars and direct attacks on civilians, and stands at the massacres of April 8 and the horrific scale of the crime. The hope is that the land irrigated with blood will not be lost for decades. A center for civil defense and young volunteers, and a longing for the private place, and for the open scene through it.
The tree, the sky, the chirping of birds, and the private room. Emotions that move with longing to float. Just like Khader does, he inspects his house, waters the cardinia tree and promises it to return.
For their owners, the places that are important occupy a prominent part of the documentaries of "Like Olives". Um Suhail is relatively happy to return to a small part of her habit of collecting dandelions "Al-Il". The tea was made on the hills of Aramoun, where it was displaced, and two firewood trees from its conifers. But the tea has a "shapeless" taste under the olive of "Pitney".
"Like an Olive" is a documentary film with two roots. The first is made up of the four characters of the film, who are witnesses of the moment and witnesses of human emotions that are free from all constraints, and governed only by the spontaneity of passion and belonging. The second carries our story and what the most moral army in the world has inflicted on us. Our martyred children and their names are in the hundreds.
Our martyrs and wounded who fell in the hundreds under the auspices of an international organization that designed the ceasefire, and lost sight of its implementation. Our villages were destroyed by deliberate targeting while they are empty of their people. So is our exterminated agricultural environment. All of them were reported in numbers.
"Like Olives" is an important documentary that draws attention to people's feelings and puts our losses in the context of a perspective that leaves an impact on the audience. A film that is right to be shown internally and externally. To the outside is a document about the severe losses that the Zionist entity has deliberately inflicted on us.
And abroad, too, the documentary says that we are human beings who miss our places and that displacement is not our hobby. He also says that the Zionist killing machine, supported by the West militarily and in the media, is interested in holding our breath. And it will not happen. "Like Olives" is directed by Ashraf Mutawa (36 minutes). Produced by the Cinema Professions Cooperative by Alisar Lebanon and Mustafa Al-Raz.
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