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Marwan’s father was the main reason Marwan was forced to go south. There is some relationship with him, and this relationship, which is clear in the background of the film, did not materialize in the narrative.
– This young man (Marwan) has a dilemma, which we all suffer, including myself, which is that he belongs to this region and does not belong to it at the same time. Marwan doesn’t realize why she is, but we know her as bystanders. He wants to leave the country and does not know if he wants to emigrate or not, like all of us. We are all convinced that it is not possible to live in this country, it is exhausting and frustrating, but we do not leave it at the same time. For example, I traveled and then found myself back. I am convinced that going back is wrong, but I did. This dilemma pushed Marwan to go south with two goals: either to reconcile with his father or to kill him. He went south to find his father with anger inside him. We feel like his father represents the generation that holds us responsible for war, the left, and defeat (all characters are defeated), but what I tried to say in the movie is that he failed even to take this classic path of metaphorically “killing the man. father ”or reconcile with the father, because something great has blocked his way. . It doesn’t matter what happened to the father, it doesn’t matter if you find him or not. He came to reconcile himself with this region, which represents his father, and to which he knows he does not belong. All this I experienced, I know how to express it, or at least I tried.
Why are all the characters passive and aggressive at the same time? Why do we feel the enemy but don’t see it?
What Marwan saw in the south were people crushed by war, characters going to their destination without controlling the road, defenseless characters. Obsessed with religious mythology, he swept the South after the 2006 war. I always say the movie is not a war movie, it is a movie that happened during the war. For me, Israel is an enemy, this is a foregone conclusion. And I started from all this to say something, not to heal. I am not interested in photographing Israeli soldiers. The enemy is there and we all know him, he wanted to talk about us. What does victory mean, are we defeated or not? Are we crushed in this world or not? Do wars decimate us or not? Did mythology invade us or not? I wanted Marwan (the main character) to be passive and aggressive. I wanted him not to know how to express himself. This is the cinematic moment, how nothing can appear. I wanted to capture the pure feeling on camera.
Tell us more about this cinematic moment for you, and more about the use of voice that is fundamental in the film, and the political content that appears from time to time.
For me, there are three layers to film, the first is sound and image. In film, the sound is somewhere and the image is somewhere else. The sound is war and the image is us. At any moment they coincide. Sometimes the sound affects the story and other times the silence becomes a sound in itself. The second layer is storytelling and the third layer is politics. I also said that the enemy is an evidence by itself, but the most important thing is how to deconstruct ourselves for ourselves, criticize ourselves, deconstruct this criticism. For me, if you are not an artist concerned with this system, then there is a problem. Being cinematographic means going outside the borders and not staying in a safe place. The viewer must be pushed and made to think. He did not want to take the viewer’s mind, but to think together.
Being cinematographic means leaving the borders and not staying in a safe place (AG)
Why a “wall of sound”?
– When Marwan went south and saw the devastation, his first feeling was unconscious. You are neither victorious nor sad. This is my first reaction. This whole movie captures the first feeling. That’s why I called it the “wall of sound.” When you listen to the wall of sound, you can’t think for a moment, you get scared for a second. This is what I tried to capture cinematographically.
At a certain point when the Israeli soldiers were up, it would make sense for them to come down, but they didn’t. Don’t you see that this is a weakness in the narrative, how to build it on luck and chance?
This is the difference between life and cinema, what I took from the real story, it is this moment. What happened at that moment actually happened. The second real thing is the dog. When the dog entered the basement and didn’t smell the gun, he didn’t bark. This actually happened and is not convincing in the movies.
In search of the “father” in the middle of the fire
Marwan (Karam Ghossein) was sure that he would persuade his father, who is in a city in an unsafe area, to leave his home and return with him to Beirut. He rejected fear and showed confidence, but fell into the clutches of a ruthless war. He is still searching for the father figure trapped in an unknown location. During a declared truce of war (the Israeli aggression on Lebanon in July 2006), Marwan leaves Beirut for the south to search for his father, who refuses to leave the village. He did not find his father, but his friends. The armistice is over. Marwan encounters several people (the late Adel Shaheen, Boutros Rouhana, Sahar Minqara, Essam Bou Khaled) stranded in a house.
Scene from “Wall of Sound”
“What about here besides death?” Marwan yelled at his father’s insistent friends who had defended the homeland and tried to change it in the past. The mission to find the father, not shown in the film, is Marwan’s last mission, and his attempt to travel is vulnerable to being hampered by this mission. In an instant, he wanted to go back, without thinking too much about the past. He wanted to go back to find his wife (Flavia Bishara) as soon as possible and to start a journey towards a new life. But the pain, the rain of explosions, the image of the father, the rubble, the war, the enemy (whom we do not see but hear his voice), the tension, the Kafkaesque and surreal image at the same time that the individual loses his identity. and logic while fear is king, everyone clung to that little house .. everyone. This is while Ahmed Ghossein’s camera captures real windows that open onto life and the future.
With courage and insight, Ahmed Ghossein abandoned the Warfare components, focusing on humans and natural fear. And to do so, he transformed the place of conflict and war from without and placed it in our minds. Ghossein’s full confidence in the cinematographic medium. He returns to the roots, to silence, to the unknown, to an elusive image, to the voices that only confirm the existence of terror, monster, enemy and danger. The twigs of war made smell, noise, voices, footsteps of enemies, strangled voices, machine gun fire and the sound of helicopters. Sound takes over the picture (Rana Eid sound design), perfectly recreating the context on the big screen. A war of which we see nothing, but it inhabits us, in its dust, in its darkness and in its shadows.
Tensions rise constantly, Ghossein imprisons his characters in the “safe” house for the entire film and chains us to them in our chairs. Ghossein presented his film in an organized way, giving each scene its right, working on the choreography of the actors, on the details of their movements in relation to the camera, on the intention behind these movements, on their interaction with their environment and your body language. The real enemy is fear. Fear of the sounds, of the explosions, of the Israeli soldiers upstairs. This enemy never takes his place on the screen, and despite his presence he fills the entire film, while the “youth” besiege him. Ghossein moved freely, unlike Marwan and the other prisoners. Presenting an abstract yet vibrant, tangible yet allegorical film. In this way, he managed to create a dialectic, about people and war, religion and civilians, youth and enemy, moral and political behavior and victory, which remains the subject of political debate until now.
The war breaks out outside, and Marwan continues looking for the “father”, and all those who are with him have left them alone to escape through the cinema, through flashes of light, drops of water, sun, cow, branches of trees moved by the wind and small reptiles that breathe. As if a twig told us that life will continue, and that the land and roots are important, but we must look for new and better worlds, albeit with pain.
“Sound Wall”: from October 29 – “VOX Cinemas” – for inquiries: 01/285582
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