The long season: I am alive because I'm not dead

Last November Idfa (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) showed a documentary filmed in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The film confronts us with the everyday life of ordinary people trying to keep up a living in bizarre circumstances. The narrative is impressive and affective as a story of poverty, lack of prospect, and irrational hope. The documentary is magnificent in its focus on the details of social life.

Imagine yourself living in a tent because your city is under siege and there is no other place to go. What would you do with all the stuff that makes a home: the books and furniture, the pots and cups, the clothes and carpets? What would you take with you in plastic bags and oversized trunks? And who would you be without the safety, comfort and context of home? The fascinating film The Long Season works as a mirror: ordinary people ending up in a tent strive to continue an ordinary life.

Refugee camp Kyria lies nearby the town of Majdal Anjar in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, only a few kilometers from the Syrian border. More than 20.000 Syrians have fled to this region, renting half built homes or tents. The tent people are the poorest, they keep their possessions in huge bags, and often arrive after having sold assets and taking on debt to pay their bills. The annual rent of a tent is $300-$1,000 a year. NGOs are on hand to help, but food rations have been scarce due to lack of funding. Only emergency medical treatment is covered. 

Filmer Leonard Retel Helmrich and Syrian artists Ramia Suleiman spent more than one year in Majdal Anjar to follow the everyday life of a few characters: Maher, a young adolescent who falls in love but is not allowed to marry as he is immature and has no money; Zahra, the young new spouse of an elderly man who quarrels all day with the first wife; Maria, a female teacher who is asked to come back to Raqqa by her father. The various scenes are connected with shots of children playing with car tires or balls, or constructing a toy truck out of debris material. The children seem happy, although one of them, Wahid, is very aggressive and annoying.

The details of personal lives and misery are stirring and, I would claim, enable us to see what a character feels or thinks or dreams.

The main narrative of the film underlines that people continue a living after having fled from cruelties and destruction. They go on even if there is not so much to do: there is no work or agricultural activity, there is no money to spent. Fortunately, a school is constructed in one of the tents, and children can have a daily rhythm there. Likewise, social encounters such as eating or drinking tea together, keep the people ‘normal’, in the sense that there is an everyday structure and communication. As French philosopher Henri Lefebvre claimed, the everyday repetition of cycles and cyclic rhythms is important in human life.

Intertwining with the main narrative we observe personal stories, and in particular the female ones are full of tragedy and lack of prospect. In the details of the individual lives, the film is heart-breaking. Schoolteacher Maria feels denied; she studied at university, but ending up in the camp makes her feel ‘like a victim’. Her father presses her to come back to Syria to marry. Zahra, the second wife of the elderly man, escaped from Raqqa where she observed the beheading of women because of their hairdo. She states: ‘there is so much anger in me’ and ‘I married to escape oppression’. Her feeling is that she is a ghost, only alive because she is not yet dead. But she constantly quarrels with the first wife of her husband, who does not accept her and emphasizes her clumsiness. The first wife, Yisra, is heavily pregnant and seems to detest everyone. Their husband cannot stand the quarrelling between his spouses and escapes back to Syria, carrying two small plastic bags. At the end of the movie he returns, when his wife bares their child. Later he moves out of the camp with his first wife and children, and the second young wife is left behind. Free but crying.

The details of personal lives and misery are stirring and, I would claim, enable us to see what a character feels or thinks or dreams. Teacher Maria wears a little bear on her bonnet, as if she herself still is a child. Zahra walks on high heels, as if she lives in a city, but the socks – due to the cold - emphasize the shabbiness of her physical presence. The film is both a documentary in the representation of circumstances in the Lebanon camp, and it is a narrative in its composition of various personal stories demanding conscious attention to plot and characterization. The stories are fragmentary, as well as authentic and suggestive. In consequence, there is a lot that the audience has to fill in and imagine, which makes the documentary absolutely fascinating.

At the time of the montage of the documentary, film maker Helmrich suffered from a heart attack and fell in a coma. At the moment he is recovering from this in a revalidation centre. Producer Pieter van Huystee and camera woman Ramia Suleiman finalised the documentary in line with – what they thought were – Helmrich’s ideas and plans. It could be that these occurrences have given the documentary an extra layer of distance and verfremdung – we do not really get to know what people experience in the situations they are in, but they also made the dramatization stronger. The representation of emptiness and solitude of the character’s lives is affecting.

As The Economist stated, refugees in Lebanon are probably better off than the hundreds of thousands in Kenya’s Dadaab camp, near the Somali border, who have been living there for decades. To us, watching the documentary in comfortable warm rooms and seats, the reality of any refugee camp is far away. This documentary, however, brings that reality close by and enables us to imagine a camp experience and thus to concern ourselves with other people’s lives distant from our own. The docu is a must see in this early new year.

The film is shown in Dutch cinema since the 28th of December 2017.