BEIRUT: The scene unfolds with a video camera running shakily down a dirt road. The camera stops at a crumpled car and hovers over the drooped figure of a fresh, bloodied corpse. An explosion rings out and the camera swivels around with a start. Welcome to Carol Mansour’s chilling documentary, “A Summer not to Forget.”
The backdrop is Lebanon, July-August 2006, as Israel unleashes what Western diplomats refer to as a “disproportionate use of force” against its northern neighbor. Now, exactly three years on from that devastating 34-day conflict, Mansour’s film has been brought back into the international spotlight with a prestigious award. “A Summer not to Forget” was this week selected as recipient of the Jury’s Award at the Sole Luna Documentary Festival, a Mediterranean and Islamic film festival held annually in Palermo, Italy.
The award, announced on July 12, could not have come at a more appropriate moment. After all, it was on July 12 that the hostilities erupted after Hizbullah took prisoner two Israel reservists in a cross-border raid.
The film documents the systematic violence and destruction that follows – as Mansour puts it, “A Summer Not to Forget” is “34 days summarized in 27 minutes.” Israeli attacks killed around 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, five UN officials, and injured over 4,400. According to Tel Aviv, 119 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were also killed.
Casualties of war are often reduced to mere statistics. But Mansour gives a face to the dead, showing horrifying images of the splattered organs and dismembered bodies of Lebanon’s victims in a bid to drive home the very real cruelty of conflict. “At the beginning I hesitated a lot [before using such images]. I didn’t want to be called a sensationalist. Then I decided that as I and all the Lebanese people went through this war,” such shocking footage was necessary to fully depict the brutality they endured.
“It is difficult to accept that despite all the advancement in science and technology, everyday, somewhere, the cruelest brutality is committed,” she said at the Sole Luna Documentary Festival award. “It is unacceptable that in 2009, we are allowing all those crimes of war to happen in front of our own eyes.”
Mansour says she is pleased her film’s plea not to forget the war is being recognized, especially among Western audiences. “The Western media failed to tell the story the way it [really] happened,” she says, citing excessive use of footage showing Hizbullah’s rocket fire into southern Israel.
Feeling powerless to the violence engulfing her in 2006, Mansour decided it was time to get the camera rolling. Filming “was my way of resisting and protesting the condition of war that was imposed on us,” she says. “It was my way of defending myself instead of using a gun.”
After recording 17 hours of horrific footage, Mansour spent three months narrowing it down into less than a half-hour documentary. “Later I would wake up in the middle of the night with the images” of broken, lifeless bodies crowding her head, she says.
Lebanon has worked hard to rebuild since the implementation of a UN-brokered ceasefire in August 2006. But as the reconstruction of bridges and hospitals erases the memory of past devastation, Mansour’s film demands that the underlying causes of war must not be so easily forgotten. “My film will continue to have relevance until the day the Israelis and Palestinians have peace,” says Mansour. “I don’t know how soon that day will come.”