A filmmaker grapples with how to represent Lebanon’s endless collapse
In this sweeping and introspective review, Muhammad Omar Janadi reflects on the layered attempts of three recent Lebanese documentaries to make sense of Lebanon’s perpetual state of disaster. The films – A Frown Gone Mad فتنة في الحاجبين by Omar Mismar, Msaytbeh: The Elevated Place by Rawane Nassif, and Nécrose by François Yazbek – were screened at the Gabes Film Festival in Tunisia earlier this year. Together, they form a cinematic conversation about trauma, memory and the limits of understanding.
The piece opens with a haunting quote from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We will never understand Lebanon.” It sets the tone for a text concerned not with definitive answers but with the ongoing struggle to narrate a country that seems to “reproduce the tragedies of the self and the other.” Each film offers a different vantage point on this narrative paralysis, invoking metaphor, memory and the body as sites of meaning-making.
Mismar’s A Frown Gone Mad unfolds entirely within a beauty salon on the outskirts of Beirut, where customers, male and female, young and old, receive Botox and filler injections while chatting with the owner Bouba about the looming threat of war. “In the July War [2006], I worked more than I ever had in my life,” Bouba says. War here becomes both backdrop and sales pitch: the language of beauty offers “discounts to die for”, while clients seek a sense of control over a life that seems constantly out of grasp. Through static shots and an observational style, Mismar’s camera captures not just the cosmetic rituals but the somatic anxiety of a population “living under the permanent threat of collapse.” As Janadi writes, the salon becomes “a space where politics meets flesh, and anxiety is transformed into an aesthetic routine.”
Rawane Nassif’s Msaytbeh takes a more personal and poetic approach. It’s a return, after 20 years, to the Beirut neighbourhood of the director’s childhood, seen through the vantage of absence: her parents have died, and the past is gone. Rather than filming interiors, Nassif lingers on the building’s balconies, filled with drying laundry and potted plants. Memory is projected onto a bullet-ridden bathroom wall in “Beit Beirut”, a former sniper’s den turned museum. For Janadi, this choice creates a powerful visual metaphor: “The balcony becomes a border zone, a contact point between private grief and public ruin.”
Finally, Yazbek’s Nécrose offers a more experimental, almost hallucinatory meditation on national decay. Drawing on philosophical texts, dream logic and poetic voiceover, most notably from Lebanese poet Ounsi el-Hajj, the film begins with a sequence of medical imagery, endoscopy footage, and X-rays, suggesting a body under examination. “Necrosis” becomes a metaphor not only for cellular death but for the chronic illness of a city like Beirut, still reeling from the 2020 port explosion. In one particularly striking image, the ruined port is framed like the aftermath of a cosmic event. “Perhaps the port explosion is a kind of Big Bang,” Janadi reflects, “that ends one form of life and gives birth to another.”
What unites these works is their resistance to resolution. Instead of building toward closure, they linger in ambiguity, exploring how metaphor can become a tool for conceptual survival. Lebanon, Janadi suggests, is not just a place of failed governance but of exhausted language, where even the most intimate gestures, like a Botox injection or a remembered balcony, carry the charge of catastrophe.
By the end, Janadi does not claim that these films solve Lebanon’s mystery. But they offer a way of sitting with it, of seeing it more clearly not through facts but through form. “We may not understand Lebanon,” he concludes, echoing Darwish, “but these films make us know it more deeply.”
Original article (“كيف نفهم «الكارثة» اللبنانية؟”) by Mohammed Omar Janad was first published in Arabic on 4 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Mada Masr is an Egyptian independent news outlet known for its critical, in-depth journalism on culture, politics and society across the Arab world.
Summary by ZN
