2023-06-22 14:16:21
When I watched “Anxiety in Beirut” for the first time, I knew that a new generation had accomplished its baptism, or laid the foundation stone for its novel. Zakaria Jaber’s documentary film is almost the complete file of what happened and what was experienced by those who were born in the early nineties, and whose awareness was the beginning of the new century, and who fought the arena of politics, art, ideas and personal independence, language, culture and behavior, throughout the past decade.
The film is very personal, and close to the life of its director, his friends, and his family. Nevertheless, it is a general historical document that records, visualizes, and tells the story of a city and the process of a complete time. Therefore, the film appears to be a continuous flood of events, with a running and intrusive camera that violates every hidden thing, from the house to the street to sticking to faces and bodies.
Zakaria Jaber’s camera, which escapes any control, is also a generation’s “style” of looking at and perceiving the world, or rather challenging, exposing and documenting it in its entirety. It is precisely this method that shows the aesthetic proposal that Jaber favors: the direct zero. Or the illusion of the director’s absence, as a deception that suggests that we are not in a movie, but rather in front of raw reality, with all its chaos, exclusivity, and inconsistency.
“Anxiety in Beirut” (first prize in the Shanghai Film Festival), crowded and intense, born of an ambition to capture a comprehensive memory, with its major stations and turns, and its shocks that form the basis of the consciousness of this generation, whose separation from its family began at the moment of the defeat of those families and the end of their last great and frustrating bets. .
Approximately, following the year 2005, that estrangement or separation will begin in search of the private option. From the disappointment of March 14, and from the mistakes of the fathers (the war generation), Zakaria Jaber and his companions will have to familiarize themselves with their language, morals, politics, art, and sensitivity, and they must also decide what to do with the heavy, difficult, and full of disappointments family legacy.
A generation that found itself in the midst of a crumbling world burdened with defeats. It is the first “problem” they have to face, to say: This is not our choice, and this is not the reality we want.
So, “Anxiety in Beirut” does nothing but narrate the rebellion, from the moment of protests once morest the garbage crisis, naive in its rejection of politics, up to the Beirut version of the slogan “The people want to overthrow the regime”, whose owners soon discovered that they were facing “disorder” and non-state.
The film burns completely and shows his nerve and his voice with the cry of October 17. The tape will be the most expressive of what happened, and also the most similar to the spirit of those involved in it. The “revolution” according to the eyes of its young men and women, and their voices, movements, words, actions and opinions. It is not a press or news tape from an observer’s eye, but a filming that is involved, preoccupied, and involved in the confrontation, just as we see today the battles filmed with a camera attached to the helmet of a combat soldier.
From Revolution to Pandemic (Corona Time). Once once more, the camera tunes in to the rhythm of reality, calms down, withdraws, and enters the home. An occasion for a harsh review with the family, a reconsideration of the concept of the family and the relationship with the father, mother and ego. Parallel to the shock of the world’s apocalypse, the fragility of the being, the cosmic fear, the gratuitous death.
The tragedy will multiply on that day, the fateful 4th of August. The city exploded. And Jaber’s camera is a minute away from the disastrous heavenly mushroom, then in the midst of fires, destruction, and bloody bodies, accompanied by ambulances and wounded friends.. and in the heart of the wound, its pole, and the cries of the afflicted.
In this way, in record time, the “adventure” of an entire generation ended. It may be said that it is the fastest generation to lose. Consecutive and intense blows, culminating in the worst financial economic collapse ever.
The great disappointment will translate itself into “Anxiety in Beirut” through the gloomy trips that Jaber will volunteer for, driving his companions to the airport, towards emigration, towards escaping from the country that has become a gaping abyss.
In a sense, the future is over before it even began. Lebanon assassinated tomorrow. What Anxiety in Beirut is doing is turning this funeral procession into the most important visual testimony before our eyes and consciences so far.
Perhaps it is a small cultural “victory” for what is left of Beirut.
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