The contrasts and contradictions of everyday life in co-existence with the horrors of war in Lebanon, are the elements that make this docudrama about the role of women in that struggle both a moving and celebratory experience.

Using some archive footage, interviews and the dramatic reconstruction of the experiences of Khadijeh – a woman from South Lebanon – under Israeli occupation, women of all ages are given a collective voice and the details of their proud, active resistance to the aggressors becomes another fact of history which time will be unable to deny. One older woman states ‘We used to fight back from all directions. We’d push the men back and forward… we the older women in front and the girls behind us.’

In gentler moments the women play with their children, talk with each other about not having been able to go to school like their brothers. As Khadijeh speaks it evolves that the very experience of resistance having become part of everyday life, has also led to self-reflection. She says ‘I’m not the type of person who takes things and accepts them like they are. Like when they say you should obey your family and do whatever they decide is right. It’s true that I’d obey them but not without suffering and asking myself questions. At one point I started to be bothered by my weakness and promised myself not to cry anymore, to face things, and I started to rebel…’

... the film approaches the south, caresses it with love, inhabits its states of being in acts of resistance, dance, laughter and tears…

– Imad Abdallah/AL HAKIKAH

Description source: Cinema of Women Catalogue Supplement (1989) compiled by Jenny Wallace.