Afrasianet - Zahi Wehbe - At the end of the night, after the Metropolis Cinema blew out its 20th candle, the audience took to the anxious streets of Beirut, and the film seemed to be over.
Because its real end is not on the screen, but in the skies of Lebanon, especially in the south, where other children are waiting for their superhero.
Months ago, in Berlin, when Marie-Rose Asta presented the Golden Bear at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, her speech carried more than the usual thanksgiving speech, a cry to the world that the children of Palestine and Lebanon do not need superpowers, as much as they need a world that prevents the Israeli occupation from bombing them.
But the same cry, in Beirut, inside the Metropolis Hall, which has reached 20 years of a busy career, turned into another shiver.
There, in front of an audience that filled the entire hall, the entire film crew stood as if they were completing the final scene, while the young director was holding the microphone in a voice that was choked with a lesson, as if time had taken her back to the aggression of July in the summer of 2006, where she was hiding behind the stone walls, innocently wondering why death would fall from above.
What a paradox! Here is her film being screened in her capital after a world coronation, and at the same time, here are the same Israeli planes returning to destroy cities and villages.
Those children who dream, just as she and her protagonists dreamed, of having superpowers capable of bringing down those deadly iron machines and deterring them from continuing their genocidal crimes against a new generation whose only fault is that they were born in this worn-out time.
This, in essence, is what the film does brilliantly, not escaping reality, but reshaping it with a fantasy that is as powerful as shooting down planes, because when war lasts, imagination becomes the only refuge capable of tipping the scales.
It's not easy to pick up a golden bear from Berlin and then bring it back to Beirut. But Mary Rose did it, as if she were putting her movie child in his grandmother's arms.
And this grandmother, Metropolis, is not just a showroom, it's the memory of a place that realizes that the child's superpowers are only a reflection of our inability to protect him as adults.
The film inhabits its first home (Lebanon), surrounded by an entire crew who tirelessly defended its vision, and this is, in itself, a parallel cinematic moment.
"One Day, Boy" (27 minutes) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy (Khaled Hassan), who lives with his uncle (Antoine Daher) in his grandfather's unfinished house in the village of Qubayat in northern Lebanon.
There, where the parents are used to the roar of warplanes as part of their diary, the child discovers a mysterious ability whose limits he does not understand.
While his uncle tries hard to keep him a "normal child" for fear of the attention of others or the danger that this may befall him, he leads the child to test his abilities innocently Spontaneously, two enemy warplanes were shot down.
The imagination then turns from a secret haven into an uncontrollable force.
If the child Khaled Hassan carries the weight of imagination and confrontation, Antoine Daher, the only adult among the film's protagonists, brilliantly embodies the weight of reality and its fear.
role as the guardian uncle is not just a supporting character, but a mirror of a society that has been raised on the forced habituation of fear, a society that fears difference and believes that survival lies in hiding and denying.
Antoine Daher, as the only mature face in this childlike world, gives the film a dramatic balance, as his internal struggle between protecting a child and suppressing his ability turns into a broader conflict between the logic of survival and the dream of change.
Directively, Mary Rose treats the place (and he means it personally as her grandfather's house) as a living being, the old stone walls, the seeping moonlight, and the silence applied when the plane passes overhead.
She doesn't depict the war directly, she depicts its tremors. The sound here is more eloquent than the picture, and this depiction (from a focal) gives the film a quiet maturity, away from the documentary scream.
The actors, especially the child Khaled Hassan, did not play roles as much as they recreated moments that every Lebanese child knows, those seconds between the roar of the plane and the eerie silence that followed.
The film is not without meaningful references, especially when the child, who seems to be quarrelsome all the time, asks why the house was demolished and rebuilt with concrete stones instead of old rocks, in a clever condemnation of distorted "modernity." In addition, the viewer picks up on hints in many of the film's talking and silent scenes.
In the course of this film, there is an unforgettable moment, that of Mary Rose in Berlin. That courageous speech turned the coronation into a testament to an era in which children are exterminated in the shadow of an international silence.
In Beirut, her tears echoed that word, as if she was signing the identity of her film once again, but under the roof of the homeland that witnessed its first details.
It may be useful to recall some of what she said on the platform of the Berlin Film Festival: "... This is what cinematic fiction does, giving the weak the ability to turn the equation around.
But in reality, the children of Gaza, in all of Palestine, and in my own country, Lebanon, do not have superpowers to protect them from bombs (...) No child in this world should need a miracle to survive an extermination fueled by veto calculations, silence and the collapse of international law.
If this "bear" has a meaning beyond my personal joy, let it be simple and clear: the children of Lebanon and Palestine are not an item on the negotiating table."
At the end of the night, after the Metropolis Cinema had extinguished its 20th candle, the audience took to the streets of Beirut packed with anxiety, and the film seemed unfinished.
Because its real end is not on the screen, but in the skies of Lebanon, especially in the south, where other children are waiting for their superhero.
Perhaps the secret of its true victory lies in the fact that, with its artistic beauty, it is an unbearable mirror of a reality that does not deserve to continue, and a painful salute to children who are still holding their heads up to the sky, not asking for a prize, asking for life.
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Zahi Wehbe - Lebanese poet and media personality at Al-Mayadeen TV.
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