Documentary on Lebanon’s civil war ‘Green Line’: figurines for childhood trauma

“Fida grew up during the war in Beirut in the 1980s, immersed in the “red hell” her grandmother spoke of. The trivialization of death made her doubt the value of life and the meaning of this endless war, so similar to so many others.”

This is what the description of the new film by director Sylvie Ballyot says. Green linewhich had its world premiere at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in its international competition this week.

In this documentary about the civil war in Lebanon, Fida, using figurines and scale models, meets militiamen and eyewitnesses to confront her childhood experience, when she was 10 years old, when she witnessed a battle in front of her school, which left 100 dead, with theirs. Fida is Elfida “Fida” Bizri who wrote the screenplay for the film with Ballyot.

The protagonist and the director, accompanied by editor Charlotte Tourrès and producer Céline Loiseau, met with film fans and the press in the picturesque Swiss town of Locarno to discuss their film, a trailer of which can be found on the website Locarno Festival website hereand the story behind it.

“The idea itself, the desire, in fact, was born a long time ago,” Ballyot shared. “I have known Elfida for 20 years. I met her just after the 2006 war, the last big war in Lebanon. And I understood, I felt when I met her that there was something in her. She spoke to me a lot about the border between life and death. She had a relationship with the language and the grammar of war and violence, as she said, that immediately seduced me, intrigued me.”

She then felt that she might have a role to play as a director to tell this story and reveal a deeper truth, but she didn’t do anything right away. “Years later, much later, I wanted to start writing something,” the filmmaker explains. “It was originally going to be a feature-length fiction film, but it couldn’t be made for financial reasons, etc.”

But it was a blessing in disguise, she explained. “Thanks to the impossibility of making this fictional film, which was almost a stroke of luck, I had to do it on my own, so I started creating scenes with little figurines from what Fida had told me about her past, her childhood – little bits.” When she showed it to him, “I understood that this little figurine that you see in the film was already very cathartic for her,” Ballyot concluded.

Bizri shared her reaction to the idea of ​​making a film. “Sylvie told me about making a film. I didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but I wanted to be nice. So I said, ‘Yes, if you want, okay, why not,’” she recalls. “But I didn’t see myself in cinema at all, so I didn’t understand what that implied. If I had known what I know today, I would certainly have been afraid to do…