A Civilized People

September 1994, Beirut : the systematic reconstruction of the city is beginning. The civil war, which began in 1975, has been over for two years. Randa Chahal Sabbag, a Lebanese film-maker whose family was politically and military involved in the conflict, gives a very personal view of these seventeen years of war. She uses archives, family videos and 16 mm films made between 1975 and 1994. The film features interviews with her mother in Tripoli, her sister in Paris and her brother in Beirut. She pays tribute to the memory of her father, who died during the war, and returns to the ruins of a city, the reconstruction of which marks the disappearance of a part of her life.

The story takes place in an around Lebanon. It concerns Farid, a repentant Islamic fundamentalist and Charles, a French diplomat. Farid is prepared to give the French secret service a list of names of terrorists operating in France on the condition that they liberate a friend of his imprisoned in France. The deal is complicated by the fact that Farid and Charles are irresistably attracted to each other, which inflames great jealously in Charles' wife, Juliette, estranging the couple.

A city emerges in the middle of the desert and dies in its richness. Women are doubly veiled, and freedoms are even more threatened. Sarah was born the day after the oil boom. She is part of the generation that believes it can get anything with the power of money, and that simultaneously sees its every desire thwarted when it conflicts with the strict laws of its country. She is unsettled by the triviality of her life and unsettles others through her beauty, and her will to push everything to its extreme. She fears not the desert, not the wind, nothing. Her thirst lies elsewhere: to leave the desert, which she hates, and in which she is kept against her will. She wanders the empty streets in her limousine, killing time on the phone, provoking strangers. Gradually, tensions arise in this desert, instilling a latent anguish interrupted by bursts of happiness, of ecstatic laughter, and of sensuality, until everything comes to a head.

A young 15 year old girl, Lamia, lives in a southern Lebanese village on the border with Israel. She is given in marriage to her cousin on the other side of the border. As Lamia crosses the barbed wire she also passes from childhood into adulthood, as brutal as our countries and the events that are to follow.

Shot between February 1976 and March 1978, Step by Step compacts the chaos of the Lebanese civil war using archival images, news broadcasts, interviews, and raw documentary footage.

The film follows Souha Béchara’s return to her village, Deir Mimas, to the Khiam jail, in the very place where she tried to assassinate General Lahd. For Souha, surviving hell is a joyful, thoughtful, and liberating travel diary. The diary of a trip that, for a moment, let one believe in the possible reconciliation of our country.