Why?

Lebanon | 1982 | 26 min | Documentary Screening copy: AAMOD - Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico Warning: the film contains graphic material which might be disturbing or traumatizing to some viewers “Why?” documents the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the three-month siege of Beirut from June to August 1982, during which thousands of people were killed and maimed, the vast majority of them civilians (over 70%). The military strategy and many of the images from this period were the same as today's genocidal war in Gaza, with the aim of destroying any presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, where the Palestinian resistance was based at the time. “Why?” deals with issues rarely or insufficiently addressed by the international media like the use of weapons (implosion and phosphorus bombs, fragmentation shells) often manufactured in the United States and prohibited by international law, and sheds light on the organization of civil defense by Palestinian-Lebanese popular committees. A film by Monica Maurer A militant filmmaker, Monica Maurer (1942, Munich) collaborated with Cesare Zavattini and filmed Chile at the time of Salvador Allende (1972), the LIP self-managed watch factory in Besançon (1973) and Kurdish struggles in Turkey (1974). Transnational solidarity movements and struggles made her move to Beirut in 1977 to work with the PLO's Palestine Film Institute, making six 16mm documentaries on and with the Palestinian resistance. Present in West Beirut during the Israeli army siege in 1982, she left Lebanon after the forced exodus of Palestinian fighters. During these five years, she filmed and photographed the day-to-day struggle, focusing mainly on the construction of medical and social infrastructures, which appeared to her as political evidence of the collective utopia that was to form the basis of the future Palestinian state. Today, Monica Maurer devotes her time to safeguarding film and photographic archives of Palestine and the fights she filmed, aware that archives, when made available, enable the writing of a political narrative of the present. In 2012, in Rome, she rediscovered the rushes, the soundtrack in Arabic and a copy of the film “Tal al Zaatar” by Jean Chamoun and Mustafa Abu Ali. With Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, she undertook the complete restoration of the rushes and a copy of the original version of the film.