Keywords

This following is a series of three excerpts from the English translation of Muhammad Malas’s diary , The Dream: Diary of a Film, which he kept while researching and filming for his documentary, The Dream (1987), about Palestinian refugees in the camps in Lebanon. The diary recounts his immersion in the life of the camps, including Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh from 1980 to 1981. Many of the people he met would later perish in the Sabra and Shatila massacres and subsequent fighting during the Lebanese civil war (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1
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Malas trying out the bed that is shown empty in the first and last frame of the film

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Sunday, March 30

Abu Shaker—the eyes

It’s our second meeting, at the house.

I went back to him again feeling that this man lived in a perpetual state wherein the ground beneath him no longer exists. It was an odd impression, as if he were standing and there was a space separating him from the ground. About to fly away, he would lift his eyes first. Then, calmly and deliberately, he’d rise a few centimeters off the ground. He had agreed to talk to me about the trip to Palestine in 1972, but he would only talk, not film. We crossed the short distance between his store and the house, and in the house, I placed a cassette recorder in front of him and let him talk.

The house, like the store, is clean, neat with everything in white. Iron bars cut across the window. The four walls are adorned with many photographs, including some of Abu Ammar, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and a photograph of a young man and woman in their wedding clothes. The recorder captures both his voice and the lively music coming through the window from the numerous speakers scattered throughout the camp. Ah yes, now I recall, I believe it is Land Day.

“I made it to Jenin. I took a car from the bridge and said to the driver: ‘I want to go to Acre Province. How much will you charge me?’ We agreed on the fare. This wasn’t right when I arrived in Palestine ; it was one of the things that happened while I was there. We were on our way and I asked the driver: ‘Which way would you like to take?’ He said, ‘From here to Nazareth to Haifa, then we reach Acre.’ Our village is between Safad and Acre, around twenty-eight kilometers from Acre. There’s a shorter way than the one the driver suggested, from Jenin to the village. I suggested to him, ‘There’s another way that’s shorter for you. We’ve agreed on the fees.’ He asked, ‘What way is that?’ I told him we’d drive through Afula, then east of this and west of that. He said, ‘I don’t know this route and have never gone that way. Are you sure? Where are you from? Are you a refugee ?’ I told him that, yes, I’m a refugee in Lebanon . He asked what year I left and I told him 1948. We drove while I showed him the way, right and left, until we arrived. I asked him, ‘So which is the shorter way—this one or that?’ The young think I’ve forgotten them, that I’m behind the times, old, no longer good for anything.”

“We stay up from morning until two or three after midnight. ‘Go now, go to sleep,’ I tell them. They say: ‘No Uncle, we don’t want to sleep. You’re here with us today; tomorrow you won’t be. We need to get our fill of you.’” I wonder if we could hear the dreams of the thirty-two nights he spent there. “Thirty-two nights and I swear I didn’t sleep, night or day. I swear to God I didn’t sleep.” He cried. “I just sat there, always distracted, distracted.” He cried bitterly. “If I had a dream, I don’t remember it now. After I came back I had many dreams, but these days I’m not alert. I don’t remember.”

“I have zaatar, olives, and yogurt for breakfast.”

“I teach my son lessons from the past.”

A tiring, anxious meeting. He is constantly distraught, overcome with grief over the land, his eyes bulging and full of tears. I am not sure why, but for me this man is the eyes of the film. I’m considering using the three-meter distance he crosses between the house and the store. I wonder if it’s possible to film the moment he returns from the store at night and lies down on his bed as one shot. What can one do with these two or three meters of space?

***

Damascus , Monday, April 21—preparing for the shoot

I have to be more specific in the film, consistent in my answers to the following questions: who is the camera for the person being filmed and whom are they talking to?

Why is the camera there now to film this or that shot or person? I also have to know what motivates the camera to move or follow, and when it should do this.

As for the lighting, I have to admit I have never seen prettier light than that found naturally in the alleys or inside the houses in the camps. So I should rely on the rules and aesthetics of the real sources of light.

I have to deconstruct the various and intertwined elements of the camp’s auditory environment and then carefully restructure them to create the film’s soundtrack: the radios, the televisions, the stolen conversations, the songs heard over and over, the Qur’an, the call to prayer, the rustle of ordinary everyday life, the wafting of voices through the delicate walls of tightly embracing houses.

Finally, there must be documentary faithfulness to the filmed material—as opposed to ideological faithfulness. This might contradict the official Palestinian mind-set.

Tuesday, April 22

What makes Palestinians Palestinian? What are its constituents outside politics and armed struggle? These are the questions I’m asking myself while preparing to film.

Sometimes I imagine that these people live in a separate world—the dream world—and the current political mode of expression that represents them inhabits yet another world—one of daydreams. Reality is the persistent attempt by everyone to hinder the Palestinian right to self-determination.

These breathless attempts to defend oneself on the one hand and the continuous losses, the frequent uprooting, on the other, lay the groundwork for their acceptance of any decision, any rights, any fate. The question now is: Who has the power to grant them their rights? Who will draft the plans and make the decisions? What fate will that be? I can’t visualize this film yet. I don’t yet have a sense of the “image” I’m after. But I’m hoping to gain access to and express the “Palestinian condition” of the Palestinians. I will film the rainbow encircling the camp from the mountain to the sea.

My friend Yusri comments that a mental image like this requires being at home with the visual aspects that express and generate it: the place, the people, the daily life. I wonder, can a dream reflect all this?

Sunday, May 4

I woke up from “a dream.”

In it, the image appeared to be framed with sharp black edges.

In the background of the image, strange events were taking place that had no relation to what was happening in the foreground. Light emanated from objects and people, emerging from them. They were bathed in the same damp waxy light. There was no sound. I don’t remember and I didn’t make out what was happening either in the background or in the foreground of the image.

Thursday, May 8

I reached Beirut in the afternoon.

Events in the West Bank were escalating. There are violent demonstrations in Jerusalem. Israeli commandos were deployed last night in Saksakiya. A roadblock was erected, and the military official in Damour was assassinated. These events lend significant leverage to the issue of self-determination, freeing it from the chains of rigid association with the desires of the Arab milieu, and providing it with further potential. I’m uncertain how much I can allude to this, or to other things in a film like this. At night, there is an attempt to deploy Israeli troops in the suburbs of Beirut . The Palestinians are taking cover in Raouche. The overall atmosphere is very tense.

***

Eman , Thirteen Years Old

“There’s a young man who works with us here in the workshop. I dreamed he was martyred.

“They carried his body and brought him here. I looked and saw his hand hanging in the sky.

“They took him and left, but his hand was still hanging in the sky.

“I once dreamed that my uncle’s wife was struck by a missile that severed her arm. She doesn’t work here, but I saw her running here, and I was running after her. Then we were in a white desert. There she was also running, and I was running after her.

“I once dreamed of a man who was beating me up, and I didn’t know him. He was beating me, and my mother was saying to him: ‘Beat her.’ I was screaming.”

Twenty-four-year-old Suad, who sat hidden in one of the workshop’s corners, seemed to emerge from the folds of cloth that were heaped everywhere, or from the boxes crammed with trimmings. When Suad spoke, I said to myself that it was time to get out the camera, time to end this stage, in the corridors of these souls.

Suad said: “He left. And we, we left. We never found out anything after that. He dropped by that night and said: ‘I’m going.’

“Later people came and said: ‘He died.’

“A woman said: ‘We saw your brother carrying a hatchet and breaking the wall to get out.’

‘In the dream, he came to the Damour house. It was night, and we were up late. Someone knocked on the door. My father said, ‘Come in.’

“He entered the house and proposed to me.

“I screamed and said to my father, ‘No Baba! He’s my brother!’

“My mother looked at me and said, ‘Shut up. That’s not your brother.’

“I turned to him and asked, ‘Are you Lutfi, my brother?’

“He looked at me and was silent. He didn’t say anything.

“I screamed and ran saying, ‘This is my brother! I won’t marry him!’

“The night Lutfi died, I went to Dikwaneh. It was almost midnight. My younger siblings were thirsty, and I had to get them water to drink.

“Where was I going to find water?

“I went to the house in al-Zaatar. I found the camp empty. I was frightened and confused. I ran to the church downstairs. I saw a young man I know there, someone I used to work with in the aluminum factory. The moment he saw me he ran to a National Liberal Party checkpoint and called out to them, I don’t know why. I heard him saying to them, ‘She’s Palestinian. I know her from when she used to work in the factory.’

“Someone from the checkpoint ran toward me. He grabbed me around my chest and said, ‘You came to your doom.’ I saw the metal cross sparkling on his chest. The armed man pulled and dragged me to the building’s entrance, and said, ‘Take off your clothes.’

“I said to him, ‘I won’t take off my clothes.’ He was carrying an M16.

“He said to me, ‘Are you a virgin or married?’

“I said to him, ‘Married, with kids.’

“He said to me, ‘Palestinian?’

“I said, ‘Syrian.’

“He said, ‘Liar. I’ll shoot you if you don’t take off your clothes.’

“I said, ‘Shoot.’

“He said, ‘I swear, I’ll make you bleed…’

“I said, ‘I won’t take off my clothes!’

“He tore my skirt. I was wearing pants underneath it. He hugged me and started kissing me, and I was pushing him away from me.

“I caught up with my family later. My father was crying. He asked me, ‘Did anybody hurt you, Daughter?’ My mother held me and hugged me and cried.

“I love al-Zaatar because I was born there. I also love Dikwaneh but I don’t want to go back there ever again.

“Lots of people told me about Palestine , and I heard a lot about it as well. Once I dreamt about it. It was exactly like they told me. But I also saw that there was thick iron separating it from Israel , like the kind they use for the big checkpoints.”

I walked around for a long time in Haifa hospital. A silence of a special kind came over me. A seven-year-old girl talked to me about her dream and said, “I saw the hospital submerged in the sea.”

“I saw myself and my family, all of us, sitting at the hospital door. The sea was surrounding us from all directions, and our legs were under water.”

“When I saw that, I got scared. I told my family about the dream as soon as I woke up. They told me, ‘Water means confusion doesn’t it?’”

When I visited the rooms of people who had sustained spinal injuries, I stopped at one of the patients. He was laying down on his bed with deathly tranquility and had fixed his gaze on a small mirror placed right next to him. The mirror reflected his face, only his face.

I imagined these injured people at the seashore. They were sitting on the beach, in wheelchairs that had sunk into the sand. I contemplated this image, silently. Their faces were toward the sea and their backs to the camera. The sun was about to set.

The shot fixed itself in my mind at a wide angle. It was a long static shot. I was seeing their injured spines moving while they inhaled the drizzle of the sea breeze.

Calm waves touched the surface of the sand and then withdrew after wetting their bare feet.

On that day I decided that this shot would be, for me, the end of the film (Figs. 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4).

Fig. 6.2
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Stills from documentary The Dream

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Fig. 6.3
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Stills from documentary The Dream

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Fig. 6.4
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Stills from documentary The Dream

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