Tales of the Wounded Land

A large part of Abbas Fahdel’s last film, Tales of the Wounded Land, bears witness to the destruction caused by Israeli bombing of the South of Lebanon, at the end of 2024, with the main focus on the unbelievable resilience of the civil population. Yes, unbelievable because all the protagonists seem to be coping more with the reconstruction than with the sorrow of grief. The fact that feelings like depression or despair are systematically coupled with the positivity of resilience clearly reveals a voluntarist stance by Fahdel. So far, so good.

From the apparent factualism of his documentation however, when we consider the dramaturgic arch of the film we will see the emergence of a personal discourse with a precise political message. From his own sweet child experiencing the bombings, and through her eyes that literally accompany us in the discovery of the ruins and in the encounters with the civilian victims, the film will then discharge all the highly emotional load onto a long final sequence with the funeral of the Hezbollah fighters, all of them men, all of them non-civilian. The message is clear: the answer to the barbarity of the bombings is in the words of the Imam that are spread during the funeral, who, in the name of “the people” or “commanding” to them (?), swears that the destiny of everyone is to become a martyr. Martyrdom is the political output of resilience: this is Abbas Fahdel’s discourse, this is the message of his film, a specific political message that I am not sure is really shared by all the civilian victims (that he has filmed) in the South of Lebanon, and that I am not sure it would be unanimously accepted in Gaza today…

A documentarist that uses the suffering of animals and the eyes of a 3 years-old child not only in order to denounce the barbarity of the Israeli government (and the political complicities of many other governments) but also in order to favour a specific political answer to the situation is acceptable only if he would explicitly express his position within a context of other positions. Assuming a controversial political stance like favouring the Hezbollah’s perspective, for a good documentarist, would imply the duty of giving enough information to the audience about the complexity of the political debate. The lack of context, and the complexity of Fahdel’s film, makes of it not a documentary but a piece of propaganda, and this is such a pity. Yes, because in this (either quite naïve or quite manipulative) way, he ruins all the precious witnessing work that he has done, and that all of us urgently need.

In fact, while I must be critical with Tales of the Wounded Land, I will also recognise that, from a sheer strategical point of view, I am also at odds with this same criticism, because I see how it could be received as one of those hypocritical “reality is more complex” arguments that are ultimately responsible for letting criminal regimes continue their barbaric offences. This is the reason I want to sharply underline the importance, for me, of witnessing the perversity of the current Israeli criminal deeds, but the powerful medium of cinema should be used to increase the understanding of the context, the history, the plurality of perspectives, together with the clear denunciation of those deeds. Welcome to Emotion, in order to awake the rest of the world from a complicit inactivity; but welcome also to Reason, not to martyrdom, in order to become concrete and operative in a political solution of the situation.

*

Abbas Fahdel | LEB 2025 | 120’ | Locarno Film Festival 2025
More Info and Trailer