The documentary “Dancing on the edge of a volcano” directed by Cyril Aris, was premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2023: A tale about the power of cinema; a tale of hope.
“Beirut became ruins, with time, ruins are beautiful, but I will never adapt… Beirut was my city, and it was destroyed. And everytime I hear that, I feel that I’m capable of murder”.
These words resonate almost like a prophetic declaration as they open the first scene of Dancing on the edge of a Volcano, a documentary feature that was premiered at the 2023 edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, which has already hosted another film by the same author, The Swing (2018).
In this 2023 audio-visual gem, the Lebanese director Cyril Aris manages to merge history, present time, fiction and real life in a complicated and stunning composition. The film starts with found footages from Beirut in the 1980, right in the middle of the storm of the civil war, borrowed from the director, Maroun Baghdadi. Everything seems calm and peaceful, while a man and a woman walk around the desolated ruins that have spread the body and soul of the city which was once beautiful. Both Beirut and its humans will be scarred forever.
Then the image gets black, and we move forward to almost 40 years later, and land on the 4th of August 2020. The date that everyone in the world [should] remember as an utmost sign of corruption of a State which by recklessly storing 2700 tons of aluminium nitrate in the port of the city, condemned its inhabitants when it eventually exploded. The opera initially presents the aftermaths of such tragedy which led to the death of hundreds of people and casted the already fragile capital into an even harsher political, economical and social turmoil. Yet another betrayal; and as the death toll rises up, so does the anger against a corrupted government (“A semi-nuclear bomb has been soaking in the sun for six years. They totally ignore it… can we possibly believe they weren’t bribed for their silence?”). Glasses are shattered almost everywhere on the ground, and the sound of footsteps over them becomes an eerie soundtrack to the life of Beirut people.
With the background of the raging covid pandemic, the rotten state and the societal predicament in which food prices are skyrocketing and even electricity seems to be luxury, a searing dichotomy comes up: whether one should love or hate their country which is telling them to leave.
It is the same question that lies underneath Costa Brava, the first feature directed by Mounia Akl that was premiered at the 78th edition of Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Venezia in 2021. The fiction film follows a family which leaves Beirut in order to escape from pollution and the corruption and lead a sustainable life in nature, but as the government tries to fix the garbage crisis by building a landfill just outside their house, the family must decide whether to resist and fight for what is right or to isolate and protect themselves. Through a metanarrative process, the film crew who are prepping for the shoot of Costa Brava, are led to cope up with the same dilemma themselves: should they face fear and struggle in the name of the power of art and justice, or should they leave the field?
Dancing at the edge of a volcano thus follows the chronicles of the preparation and shooting of Costa Brava’s crew, stuck in such predicament and trying to stay afloat, against the backdrop of a devastated city on the verge of collapse. It doesn’t matter what is fiction and what is reality anymore, a script or “real” words: their boundaries are blurred behind the lens of the camera, as those between art and life are, in a way that sometimes we can’t tell whether we’re watching rehearsed scenes or events filmed in their spontaneity just as they happen. The lines of the fictional characters as they express their fears and their sorrow over the destiny of their beloved land are not separable from the feelings of the actors who play them, and from those of the people who work in the set. They’re all living the drama of 2020 Lebanon that they come to enact, just as they’re all facing the troubling question about the transformative effectiveness of filmmaking, a doubt that slowly creeps in but that is soon swept away. The project will be completed, and art will indeed thrive among devastation, making the shooting of the film almost like a gateway to one’s soul and feelings, a common experience of sharing loss and trying to recuperate the real self. Because when everything is gone there’s nothing else you can do but to stick together, finding strength in the community and making something out of it: “Should I lament on everything I’ve lost? If I do so, I’ll lose myself, there would be nothing left”.
This breath-taking documentary will leave Karlovy Vary overwhelmed with a multilayered reflection over cinema as a “collective healing therapy”. As long as there will be people willing to speak up, Lebanon will still be alive. It is a “country that was condemned, yet it’s still living. Half of the people are gone, yet it’s still alive”, as it will continue to exist and gloom in the hearts of those who love it, that is why the film is filled with hope, as proved by the final poem.
“Beirut, I don’t mean to be silent. I’m just trying not to cry. How did we get here? Never mind… my eyes will adjust to darkness. I’ll leave for a while, but when I come back, it will be summer, there will be blazing sun and music everywhere. You’ll ask me: what took you so long? And I’ll tell you where I’ve been”.
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