DUBAI: The new documentary from filmmaker Daniele Rugo, “The Soil and The Sea” could be taken as a companion piece to his last — “About A War” — in that both deal with the legacy and trauma of Lebanon’s Civil War.
While “About A War” featured conversations with fighters from all sides of that conflict, “The Soil and The Sea” examines the issue of the many (more than 100) mass graves that litter the country and, according to the synopsis, “unveils the violence lying beneath a garden, a school, a café, a hotel, and other unremarkable landscapes.”
A still from “The Soil and The Sea.” (Supplied)
“The film started as an attempt to make something that could trigger conversations around the many unmarked burial sites from the Civil War,” Rugo tells Arab News. “The problem of mass graves is one that is common to nearly every modern conflict and the same goes for enforced disappearances, so we hope the film will resonate with audiences globally. Each person in the film is remembering a loved one who is still missing and each testimony is an act of love as well as an attempt to keep their memory alive.”
Visually, the film tracks these burial sites as they are now — with no sign of graves or bodies. Voiceovers tell the stories of some of the people who are likely buried beneath them. On screen, we do not see the speakers.
“There is a long tradition in documentaries that deals with victims of atrocities and trauma by focusing on their faces — by making an icon of the victimized face,” Rugo says. “We were clear from the start that we wanted to move away from that and make a film of places. It is through these places that we can register how much has been forgotten and how the country has moved on — but without dealing with what it has moved on from. The places are completely ordinary and, by and large, show no sign of violence. But the voices force us to read them differently, open up a different kind of register — you have to try to put the voice and the image together and that’s difficult, which probably makes you feel the violence in the voices even more.
“A mass grave is a site of invisibility, it is a place that hides its true nature,” he continues. “It was therefore important that this invisibility — this hiding away, this absence — was somehow at the very core of the film.”
