This is a conversation with Lebanese director Ely Dagher. He is the director of the Palme D’Or-winning Waves ’98 (available below), one of my favorite short films. He also has an upcoming feature film called The Sea Ahead.
I highly recommend watching Waves ’98 before listening to the episode. It’s only 15 minutes long 🙂
Topics discussed:
- Waves ’98
- The image of the city
- The 2015 You Stink Lebanon uprising: context/background
- The feeling of history repeating itself: Waves ’98 features the 1998 waste crisis which led to the 2015 waste crisis (which led to the uprising)
- Inter-generational anxiety: ‘I don’t want to end up like them’
- On resilience and why it’s a failed notion
- The ‘ghostly figure’ in literature and movies, including in Lebanon
- Haunting from the future, the feel of being stuck (permanent liminality)
- The post-August 2020 port of Beirut moment
- Interesting comparisons between Lebanon and Hong Kong, and their relationship with the past and future
- How do we live day to day while also being in a state of anxiety? (his upcoming film)
- How Beirut is portrayed in Waves ’98 and how Beirut has changed since the nineties
- The relationship to the city and the sea in Beirut
- Beirut as a ghost town
- Hauntings in Waves ’98 and in real life; cyclical hauntings
- Our peculiar relationship with television
- Our complicated relationship with the sea growing up in post-1990s Lebanon
- The politics of decay (my essay on the topic)
- war/post-war vs war/not-war
- The anticipation of violence
- ‘wartime’
- Is there a way out of that cyclical haunting?
Recommended Books & Movies
- The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
- Persona by Ingmar Bergman
- Caché by Michael Haneke
Resources mentioned
- In Conversation with Ely Dagher, Director of ‘Waves ’98’
- We are not martyrs (2013)
- resilient: broken
- Ghassan Salhab’s Phantom Beirut
- The Perfect Day Will Never Come: Restlessness in “A Perfect Day” and “Here Comes the Rain”
- The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations
- The politics of decay: death, mortality and security
Episodes mentioned:
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Music by Tarabeat.
Transcript prepared by Alice Bonfatti and Antidote Zine:
The themes in Waves ’98, in terms of temporality, are around this idea of dealing with an unresolved past, a very moving present that’s unpredictable, and an even more unpredictable and menacing future.
Ely Dagher: My name is Ely Dagher, I’m the director of Waves ‘98; it came out in 2015. I recently completed a feature film here in Beirut, called The Sea Ahead.
Elia J. Ayoub: Can we start with some background into Waves ‘98? A surface level description without too many spoilers? What is it about? And more importantly, how did it come about?
ED: It’s a tough question, actually. It came about in 2011 or 2012, at the beginning of the war in Syria,and I was going back and forth between Europe and Beirut at the time. One time when I was here, the situation was quite tense and there were checkpoints everywhere, but everybody was going about their business as usual. And for some reason, for the first time—I guess because the tension was so visible everywhere—I couldn’t really connect with that world, that bubble, and pretend that everything was fine.
It came from there. I had this image of the city; I wanted to explore my relationship with the city and with living in it. How did I feel towards the social level that we create to protect ourselves from the outside world?
EA: I first watched the film shortly after it came out, in 2015 or 2016. As it happened, it was soon after the waste crisis that led to what’s now called the You Stink movement, the 2015 waste crisis. That summer, Beirut and Mount Lebanon suffered from a pretty bad waste crisis, and that led to a protest movement called You Stink—a reference to the waste, but also a metaphor for the political class. This is why Waves ‘98 was rather special to me. I was reflecting, in early 2016, on the summer of protests, and I had cinema studies in my future (which is what I’m currently doing), and here comes a short film that dealt with our generation’s anxieties, with a waste crisis being featured in the movie.
But I remember when we first started chatting about this, you said that mentioning a waste crisis was coincidental, that Waves ‘98 was already done by the time the 2015 You Stink movement happened. Can you give a bit of background into the timing of it all?
ED: Yeah. The protests started in summer, after the closure of the landfill, which was in July. The film came out in May, and I had finished production earlier in the year, in January or February. And those clips [from the movie] were picked in 2013—so it was completely coincidental that that happened again.
I had a similar experience, in the sense that I had forgotten, through the process of going to festivals and stuff, what the footage was about. And then it hit me one day, when the protests had just started and I was watching the film at a festival—it felt like the loop was closing in again.
EA: This might be one of those things that a non-Lebanese audience misses, but the waste crisis mentioned in Waves ‘98 is a different one. As you said, the movie came out before 2015. It’s just easy to forget, especially if you’re watching it during the protests, or after the summer of 2015; the waste crisis mentioned in Waves ‘98 is the 1998 one. That waste crisis in many ways led to the 2015 waste crisis, because in 1998 they had to build this landfill; then the closure of that landfill led to the 2015 crisis and the protests that came after it.
So the coincidence is quite extraordinary. But you had your specific reasoning for choosing the 1998 waste crisis. What was it?
ED: In 2013, I was watching a lot of newsreels from different stations, doing some research about what was going on that year, trying to find an issue or crisis that everybody would be affected by. We all know that the news in Lebanon is often polarizing and very politicized; the news clips would always take some political angle, and I wanted to find something that would go beyond the political and sectarian divide and would speak to all Lebanese audiences that would watch the film and would relate to it. I had to find that element from the real world that would express this mess that we have to put up with, and put it in the film.
That’s where the crisis came in. It could have been something else, but for some reason, at the time that’s what felt right. Strangely enough, when the waste crisis blew up in 2015, after the film’s release—it was a weird thing where reality catches up with fiction. But at the same time, when I did the film, I didn’t know there was going to be this sense of positive hope or change that could come out of it.
In that sense, how I treat disillusionment and anxiety in the film, and where that took us in 2015 was a totally different place. At the same time it would happen afterwards; it doesn’t always last so long. So I don’t know. It doesn’t refer to the 2015 crisis per se, but the intention of getting something that crossed the boundaries of political problems and sectarian divides is something that unified people, and I think it can happen again. It might happen this year again, if they stop collecting trash. And it might happen again in the future, just like any other catastrophe, unfortunately, that we have been going through.
EA: Waves ’98 is one of my favorite films that came out of Lebanon. I’m not going to claim any expertise, but one of the insights I got out of this film is this intergenerational anxiety, or this haunting, we might say, that we see Omar, the main character in the film, experiencing. He repeats a sentence that is now stuck in my mind. In English: I don’t want to end up like them. He keeps on repeating it.
We had a written conversation back in 2018 when I was first looking into the movie within my PhD work. But my question to you now is: in your view, why is Omar so worried about “ending up like them?”
ED: That ending-up-like-them comes from many different places. In the context of how Omar says it, it’s about giving up to disillusionment and being numb. When you abandon all sense of hope, that’s also how you can live in denial. There is a need to express this anxiety as well; first it’s pretending that it’s not there.
That’s something that I personally have been aware of for a very long time, because it affected me and a lot of people around me, and I know that a lot of times it has stopped me creatively, and in many decisions in my life. Thinking about it and expressing it in the film was my way of dealing with it. It was, at the time, therapeutic. Also, with lots of people that saw the film, I had similar conversations, even with my parents. My dad told me—first thingwhen he came out of the screening, he said, You’re right, and gave me a proud look. And I had been worried he would be offended by the film.
In a way, everybody knows this feeling, but some of us tend to suppress it and ignore it and pretend it’s not there. Over the last couple of years, denying that has become much more difficult, especially after the last year and the explosion. I feel like everybody feels this way, and everybody is aware of it. There’s a certain acknowledgment of the current situation which I never felt before.
EA: Yeah, 2020 is the year when, especially after the explosion in August, this concept of resilience came up, which many people in Lebanon would use as an example of how tough the Lebanese people are. For me, it’s been dying for a long time, to be honest. I participated in this 2013 campaign after one of the explosions Achrafieh. The campaign was We Are Not Martyrs, because the usual narrative came out describing the victims of that explosion as martyrs. But the notion of the martyr is that you’re dying for some kind of cause, and obviously no one could really figure out what cause they died for. They were victims.
Of course, we saw this in 2020: the politicians came out with the usual narrative, and if I’m not mistaken, even the president and some of the others were saying things like, These are martyrs and They died in the explosion and therefore they’re martyrs. It’s a way of avoiding responsibility.
This narrative of resilience is bullshit. I have an essay called resilience:broken; the main story that led to this essay—I had personally heard two people tell me the same thing (one on Twitter and one messaged me privately), that within an hour after the explosion, their fathers, two different people, were already rebuilding parts of the house. For me, it was no longer good enough to call this resilience. I think something is deeply broken in us if this is the immediate reaction. Because it doesn’t give time for anger, for absorbing the shock of what had happened.
But as you said, that was probably the line that was crossed. It was too much; it’s not possible to pretend anymore, in that sense.
ED: I know somebody who wanted to fix his apartment also immediately after the explosion. I was not getting it, because it took me three weeks before I came back to my apartment. It didn’t seem urgent at all to go back to rebuilding anything. And I think a lot of people around me felt like that. The shock of the explosion and whatever came afterwards was too big to ignore. So even though some people tried to push this concept of resilience, more people than ever accepted it.
Again, like I said, we’re starting where very few people see it, and getting to a place where it’s getting a bit better in that sense, where there’s a bit of more awareness on that level. I wouldn’t say everybody feels like that, though.
EA: No. It’s always difficult to say if it’s ever a majority. In terms of sociology, there is generally an understanding that what you need is a percentage of the population, but it has to be a consistent one. It doesn’t necessarily have to be everyone, or even a majority.
But yeah, that initial myth, the myth of Beirut rebuilding itself a billion times or whatever—at this point, it’s the same reason that the 2013 explosion led to many people, including myself, declaring We Are Not Martyrs. 2020, especially since it came after the 2019 uprising, was that other thing, like: No, we’re really not martyrs, and we’re not even resilient; we’re actually just—this is just fucked. This is not good. We’re just victims, if we died or even if we didn’t die.
ED: Yeah, it’s just survival mode, beyond anything else.
EA: Yeah, and that creates a different kind of implication, because if we’re martyrs then we did it for a cause, and many people would therefore justify it, but if we’re not martyrs then we have been killed; if we are victims of something then there are perpetrators. And that’s the entire point of them not wanting to use those terms, and wanting to say “martyrs” instead.
ED: The whole narrative for the explosion started out being like, It was a welding accident! and then some other random accident. It’s clear that nobody wanted to take responsibility; playing the martyr card is just one part of it.
EA: It’s very difficult for me to talk about a movie without talking about its context, and as it happens, the context that has followed Waves ’98 is so overwhelming, it’s difficult not to bring it up as well.
In our 2018 conversation, I mentioned the “ghostly figure” in Waves ’98, and a ghostly figure in general has become relatively common; at least many Lebanese films after 1990 have brought up a ghostly figure. In some films it’s a literal vampire; in other films, it’s a haunting, whether an actual ghost or some kind of spirit—or even a real person. In Ghassan Salhab’s [1998] film [Phantom Beirut] it’s a person who was supposed to be dead, but isn’t dead. In A Perfect Day, a [2005] film, they don’t know if the father died or not, because he’s one of the forcibly disappeared, but they have to make the decision whether to declare him dead or not, so there is that haunting throughout the film (which I also recommend).
But what I found unique in Waves ’98 (and on a different level, Submarine, which is another short film, by Mounia Akl; we’ll talk about it in a bit) is that you had this haunting from the future. It was the fear of being stuck, essentially in perpetuity, in the present. If I want to be fancy about it, I would call it permanent liminality. Essentially it means an extended present; we’re stuck in the present because the past keeps on repeating itself and therefore there’s no future.
And basically, this fear of I don’t want to end up like them is what created the ghost. I remember reflecting on that a lot, and it still to this day is something I use. The sentence I don’t want to end up like that has become a thing I think about a lot. I remember that soon after the explosion even, I thought about this. After the uprising of October 2019, a few months later I had Lina Mounzer on the podcast. She is a Lebanese writer who I’ve had on a couple of times now, once shortly after the uprising and once after the blast, after the explosion. The first time around, we spoke a lot about life in the midst of history, because we really felt that however it might end, October 2019 was something that was objectively unique. We spoke about it also in terms of our own experience, like what we felt experiencing it. Then of course, fast forward to the episode after the explosion—it was August seventh or eighth, just a few days after—and it was really about how we were broken. I haven’t listened to it again, because it was a rather difficult one to do. But that’s what really came out of it, that This is something that really changed things, but on the other side of the coin, if October 2019 changed things for the better, August 2020 changed things for the worse.
This is what I thought about again more recently while preparing this chat with you. I was thinking about it when I watched Waves ’98 again. And the thing is, I’m in conversation with a number of activists and artists from Hong Kong; the uprising in Hong Kong happened more or less at the same time as the uprising in Lebanon, it was a few months before. Hong Kong is a small place like Lebanon (smaller, I think), and it also has this problem, to put it very mildly, with it’s past—and now, especially with increasing authoritarianism, with its future. It’s future is being taken away from it. We had this exchange, myself and a Hong Kong activist (who was also the very first guest on this podcast), and we spoke a lot about the notion of disappearances and the notion of hauntings from the past and hauntings from the future.
What I’m trying to tell you is that Waves ’98 has even found some resonance outside of Lebanon, and I think it’s fair to say that, especially with the experience of the global COVID-19 pandemic since 2020, many more people might feel, if not the specific hauntings of Lebanon, at least some unease, and might find some resonance in watching it.
It’s been almost six years since it came out at Cannes. If you’ve been re-watching it, or if other people have watched it recently, are there interesting reflections that you would like to share about the past six years with relation to the film?
ED: Yeah. Speaking of reflections, I had a class with some students from the architecture department at AUB, and they had a really interesting analysis of the film. Strangely enough, this was two months ago–it was interesting to see how it spoke to a lot of them about the current situation of the country. Towards the end of the conversation, they were all talking about how they identify and how they feel today, and also about the question of Should they stay here? Should they leave? Complete loss in their future. And it was kind of a depressing conversation, honestly, towards the end, but it was interesting to see how the film, which came out six years ago, still speaks to the present today.
When I did the film back then—it was a very different time before 2016. There were some protests that started in 2011 and 2013, but it wasn’t at all the level that we’re at today. For some reason—I grew up in the eighties; I remember a bit of the war, but mainly my childhood was the post-war recovery, as they call it, which got us where we are today.
So I saw this great time where everybody is making money and everybody’s happy that we’re building the country, and then it just slowly started collapsing after that. The 2015 protest was one of the first ones I remember that was that big, as a counter-movement to the state of affairs. It felt like it gave people a lot of hope. And soon after that, you know how it was crushed. They had all these rumors and conspiracies about who’s paying for the protesters, and who’s behind this, and they managed to suppress the movement. And then we went back to the state that I felt before 2015, but somehow it was even stronger.
And I started writing my feature film—I cannot separate the last six years of going through the process of re-watching Waves, with what’s happening in the country, without also considering my last film, my feature. Because I started writing towards the end of 2015, when the movement was getting crushed again, and I felt like I had much more to explore and express (and understand myself, also) about this whole situation—about the anxiety and about the feeling of stuck-ness and how you deal with it.
Also there were a lot of my friends who—for some reason, that was the year when they were fed up with living here. They felt that their health was in danger, their kids’ health was in danger, and a lot of people started leaving again in 2015. In my personal case, for example, a lot of people from my family had left in the nineties, and unfortunately a lot of them had to come back—and they came back more broken than they had left, sometimes with only a passport and sometimes not even that, having lost basically everything they had built for years before that. I wanted to somehow explore what that meant, this idea of wanting to leave—and what does that mean exactly—and then to return to where Lebanon is today.
So a lot of the themes in Waves, in terms of temporality, are around this idea of dealing with an unresolved past, a very moving present that’s unpredictable, and an even more unpredictable and menacing future, which somehow are in waves. I develop this more in the film. Then yeah, similarly but even more complex than what happened with Waves was that we only started pre-production [on The Sea Ahead] in November 2019, so at the beginning of the protest movement and the whole revolution.
There was a huge sense of euphoria in the city. We were walking everywhere protesting, blocking roads, blocking parliament, and there was a huge sense of solidarity. You saw people from all walks of life and all different cities. And for a brief moment, I questioned whatever it was that I was working on, because I felt like I actually believed that change can happen, and that we’re at the brink of something almost historic, that This was it.
And the closer we got to the shoot, the more that started to disappear. I’m not sure when Hassan Diab’s government came in, but it was around that time. We shot at the end of January 2020. So we were shooting, and we’re going back into this state again, even deeper! Deeper depression, deeper disillusionment and feelings of hopelessness. And everybody else had felt that as well, and we were making a film about this feeling.
It was a bit tough, but we had a really great cast; we had really great crews. We pulled it together. And it’s not a “resilience” thing, we just had to do what we had to do. Also, living that through those times was important.
EA: What can you tell us about the film?
ED: It’s the story of a young woman, twenty-six years old, who had left Beirut to study in Paris at the age of twenty-one, and for reasons we don’t necessarily know, she got to a point where she had to come back to Beirut. The firm starts at her return in Beirut; it’s all set in Beirut, and chronicles her return as she tries to lay low, as she just escaped something and she is in this broken state. But she comes back to a country that—it’s not a contemporary of 2020, but let’s say of early 2019, which is different but also not that different from where we are. And yeah, there is a general sense of limbo or numbness. Through this time, she’s with her family, she starts reconnecting with her past, her past lover, and the lives that she had in Beirut, and the life that could have been had she stayed.
So it’s really about coming to terms with the past, and what were the reasons behind her departure and why she left Beirut in the first place. And there’s this permanent, looming fear of the catastrophe. For some reason, that’s something that I always felt, and that time it felt stronger than ever, when I was writing the film. So yeah, It’s really about the idea of How do you live day-to-day or even move forward with your life while always being in a state of anxiety about what might happen and what’s going to happen?
It’s really about these two normally dissonant relationships between hope and despair. They do coexist in all of us, not only here living in Beirut but everywhere, and also something that I felt towards the end of the production on Waves ’98, and which I think is where the last scene comes from, is somehow the understanding that they can co-exist and it’s okay that they coexist. Being completely hopeful isn’t necessarily something very useful, but then being in despair isn’t either.
I think there’s a middle ground where we need to find some terms of acceptance. It’s never going to be a happy Hollywood ending where everything turns out right, but that shouldn’t stop us from at least trying to change things. I guess that’s my personal take on things. I’m not the most optimistic person, but I’m not defeatist and in despair either. It’s a weird place to be, but I think we have to embrace that if we want to move forward.
EA: I don’t know if you know of the term pessoptimist? It’s a bit of that, like preparing for the worst while trying to work for the best, that kind of mentality. But it’s a very difficult one to maintain.
You’re in Beirut, as you said, and Beirut itself, in Waves ’98, is portrayed in a certain way—it’s technically portrayed in a fictitious way, but for me, it felt very accurate. And you told me back in that early chat in 2018:
“Early on, I knew that my main character was as much Beirut as Omar, and it was important to portray Beirut in its textures and colors while also being impressionistic. It’s about how it feels more than the way it looks in ‘reality,’ which is why I still worked with real photos and footage. The characters I wanted to remain abstract and neutral, which is why they are animated in a simple way, with basic character design and outfits. They are meant to represent a broader group of people than the individuals that they are.”
Can we talk a bit about Omar’s Beirut? How has Omar’s Beirut changed since Waves ’98 came out?
ED: I guess Omar’s Beirut, let’s say the end-of-nineties Beirut which the whole magical journey in the film represents, was a time when I personally ventured into the city. I grew up a bit outside of the city, and that was the time that I ventured into the city and made new friends and explored things, and it had a very idyllic feeling, I guess because we were young as well, and sort of careless. And that Beirut is mixed with the Beirut that came around a little bit after that, which was the chaotic Beirut, the Beirut that was completely cemented everywhere.
I grew up in a farmhouse, actually; we had a garden and it was an old farmhouse. We lost it in 2004. So also gentrification—they built a huge tower instead—was something that I personally felt very angry about for a long time, and I think that’s where that aspect of the city comes from. Because I grew up also really close to the sea, but bit by bit, I started not seeing the sea. That’s also why, when they go to that magical world, the sea is the first place they go to. But it comes from this idea that I grew up in a time when we already had little access to public spaces and beaches and things—everything was polluted—and it got worse around that time. I wanted to explore the contrast between what we would ideally want it to be versus how it actually felt, like a completely overgrown cement jungle that was quite suffocating.
So how has it changed since then? The last couple of years are very specific. Before 2019, it was more of the same. But with the whole COVID crisis, economic crisis, right now the city feels more like a ghost town. I live in Achrafieh, and a lot of houses are destroyed since the explosion; the streets are empty and there’s power cuts all the time. It just seems like a more extreme version of what Omar’s Beirut was in ’98. Just more of the same but worse.
EA: I grew up in Ain Saadeh, which is in Mount Lebanon, just next to Beit Mery. For me, Beirut was always concrete, because I grew up around more trees than are in Beirut. But it became my home when I started at AUB in 2010-13. I didn’t see that much of the gentrification, because by the time I moved there, most of it had already happened. But of course that continued. I’ve mentioned the story a number of times of when I was involved in the Beirut heritage campaigns in the early 2010s—it was all about trying to prevent or mitigate gentrification as much as possible, especially when it came to nice and pretty-looking old buildings and that sort of thing.
ED: It’s funny that you grew up in Ain Saadeh, because I went to school in Ain Saadeh, I was at Mont La Salle. You know what that is?
EA: Yeah, I did a year at Mont La Salle.
ED: The view that Omar has over the city from his school comes from the view that we had from Mont La Salle over Beirut. I used to sit there and watch the city for a very long time. Again, I want to go back to the the magical aspect, because where I went to school it was a bit outside of Beirut. I made a lot of friends when I was sixteen from Hamra in Beirut; there were areas growing up that were segregated back then—we didn’t really go to these places. Downtown was still off-limits until the end of the nineties. So there was a whole part of the city that I didn’t know, that I started exploring when I was in school.
I guess that’s why I felt more connected to these things, because I was living there more. Between my parents’ house, which as I said we lost in 2004—I was nineteen or twenty at the time, I was an adult, and we had one week to leave the house and find something else, so it was quite traumatic. And the whole neighborhood changed completely since then. That’s something that has marked me for a long time.
Now, for example, in my feature film—I haven’t said this before—we basically shot it in my parents’ apartment, which is where they live now. It’s in one of the towers outside Beirut that “overlooks the sea” but not really. So that element still made it into—I’m obsessed about, or haunted, by this, by the the city’s presence.
EA: I grew up being able to see the sea, but always with that layer of pollution that you see on top of it. That always colored—literally colored it—from a distance. Unfortunately it really does color it brown. But that’s why I always felt very alienated by the sea and by the coast. My partner is from a coastal town in Italy; when we go to visit her folks I would feel like I’m in a strange land, an alien land, and whenever I would go to the mountains it’s like, Okay, this is more familiar now.
But you mentioned hauntings, and of course that is the main theme that I’m exploring in one of my chapters of this PhD, this cyclical hunting: things repeating themselves, I don’t want to end up like them, and so on. And one of the ways you show that is, you use television to “install the mood” that when he says, I don’t want to end up like them. If I remember correctly, there’s a television scene, and then he says that. For me, television has also had this quality to it, and that’s why here in this apartment, there’s no television. I’ve gotten rid of televisions whenever I would move to a new place. I don’t have one at home. I don’t like them. Part of it is that quality: for me growing up, television was the evening news, and the evening news tended to be for the most part bad shit happening. There was almost never any Today there’s something good happening! It wasn’t part of the media landscape.
But the television present in Waves ’98 is maybe a curious detail for a non-Lebanese audience. I’m not sure if you’ve seen different reactions. Maybe not. But in terms of the televisions themselves—or at least the haunting quality of watching television in Lebanon—from your standpoint, can you to explain it?
ED: Of course. There’s a small detail I just remembered. Back in the time when I was working on the Waves—I was writing and drawing and everything—I remember it was basically when the Arab Spring started, the revolutions in Egypt and then throughout the region, and I was glued—I had the TV on the whole time. I felt that something so big was happening, and that was how I felt that I was close to it. But then, at the same time it was lots of bad shit happening. But just as a side note, I had the TV on for years around that period for that reason.
But in the film, the TV is really the connection to the outside world—to the real world versus the animated one. And it is a constant reminder that things are not really going well. It comes from a personal place, I guess. Living here, sometimes you’re just going about your day, you’re doing things, getting things done, and then you hear some news somewhere and turn on the TV and something bad has happened, someone has been assassinated, or there are casualties, and then everything stops and we just sit there in front of the TV and follow the news. Somehow we don’t really react: just absorbing and watching and experiencing this terrible thing—but just through the TV. I would spend days on the couch, or in the kitchen the TV is always on in the background, discussing what had happened.
And then slowly it goes away. But then, at least for me, there is always this fear that it’s going to happen again soon. Besides the fact that it’s on TV, that’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot, also creatively: whenever something like that would happen, I would be like, Okay, whatever project I’m working on is worthless now because there’s something much worse or grander happening outside. How do you continue when there’s a constant reminder of that, and you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it? Maybe you can. But at least that is the general feeling usually when these things happen.
In the film, there’s the TV in the beginning, where the father is asleep in front of the TV, and then he says, I don’t want to end up like them, but there’s also another very brief shot of the TV towards the end of the magical scene, just before everything starts to crumble again. For me—and I say this without any pretension, but for a while watching the film after it came out, and I had worked on it, when that scene comes, it gives me goosebumps.
A lot of these things come from a very personal place. It’s difficult for me to assess how a foreign audience would get it. But for me, seeing that footage, after being in this world, and the sea, and all that magical utopian life, it’s like a punch in the face. It might not be the same for everyone, obviously.
EA: There is that Hong Kong friend—she reflected on that as well. I’m always fascinated by these other contexts that also have this very difficult (to put it mildly) relationship with the past. Hong Kong has a lot of these “disappearances.” There are entire books discussing that. Now things are changing so quickly there that what I say is almost irrelevant, but before the events, before the protests and the crackdown and everything, they had this expiry date, basically—2047, fifty years after the handover, fifty years after 1997—they had this looming. Literally, they would describe it as an expiry date. It created a whole number of artistic creations, especially movies, but also other stuff, books as well, novels and stuff, with this in mind: How do you create a future, how do you think of the future, if you know when the future is going to stop, when the future is going to end?
Obviously it creates a different kind of temporality, different kinds of anxieties even as well. But for me, that scene, the one in the end—the magical scene as we’re calling it—was a good contrast. I don’t think we’ve mentioned this yet, but you use both animation and real-life footage, and you blend them both together at times. I’m not a movie analyst, but I think this is what creates that effect of, Is this real, is this not real? This “in-between-ness” as you’ve described it before.
But that scene—you mentioned when you were talking about the sea; I would just ask you to expand a bit, because for most people in Lebanon, at least after a certain age, the experience of the sea is not very deep, largely because most of the coast is privatized, and pollution on most of the coast is pretty bad. Although there are folks who will swim far away and maybe discover the depth of the sea or whatever, I think most people don’t do that due to this alienation. So the contrast here is this magical world where there are these massive, colorful creatures. Can you talk a bit about the creative process behind it all?
ED: Yeah. The funny thing is that I had some people, after screenings, who thought this was just some acid trip or some drug trip and that was it. I had never even considered that. Yeah, they’re young, maybe they did take some drugs, but that was not the point. As I said before, growing up on the coast and having my access to the sea blocked, I always had a very special relationship with the sea. Whenever I would travel somewhere, I would go and watch the sea for a while before I leave. There’s something I find very freeing or liberating about it. It’s mainly because I grew up on the coast, where you’re facing the sea on one side, which is not accessible, and behind you, it’s just walls of buildings the mountains.
Geographically, growing up here, the sea had that feeling of an opening, of an escape. I know now, for example, if I go somewhere more inland, I feel less comfortable. It feels not very familiar; I feel like I’m far from the sea. It’s a strange thing, it’s not a tangible thing. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just how I grew up.
The element of the sea comes largely from that, and in terms of the creatures and the experience of the city, I think it was really coming from this feeling I had when I was younger, and I explored the city and I grew up and learned so much as I went out of the heavily segregated regions that we had in the nineties. It felt like everything was possible. I made friends that are still like family to me today; we had big dreams; we were young. The magical and surreal elements of that world, and the animals, come from that feeling that everything is possible and you can have the world of your dreams somehow.
But yeah, we all know that reality always ends up seeping in somehow and can crush those dreams.
EA: That’s the haunting bit.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay for Regards, which is a [francophone] film journal published by USJ (University of Saint Joseph) in Lebanon, reflecting on the metaphor of waste as being deeply indicative of politics in Lebanon. The You Stink movement was about the crisis—the crisis was stinking; the waste was stinking, obviously—but also symbolic of the system itself, of politics in Lebanon, of the establishment, and so on. They are rotting from within.
It kind of took me by surprise, once I got into that rabbit hole, academically, to discover that there’s even a book called The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations, and the same author (Jessica Auchter) also wrote an essay called “The Politics of Decay: Death, Mortality and Insecurity.” In both cases, Lebanon is brought up, and especially the 2015 You Stink movement. She clearly saw the links between hauntings and decay, before I did. It helped me not feel insane while I was seeing that link myself. I had started feeling that the decay is both—decay is obviously linked to mortality; it’s obviously linked to death; it’s as grim as it gets.
And at the same time, two short films—yours and Mounia Akl’s Submarine, which came out a year later—represented a potential shift from the movies that came out before. The way I argued it in that essay (though events have changed things a bit) was that there was a first wave and a second wave of cinema after the official end of the civil war, after 1990, and the difference between those two is that the first wave was largely by people who grew up during the war. You were born in the eighties, but you grew up in the nineties; in their case, they grew up in the seventies and eighties—basically our parents’ generation.
In their movies (I don’t want to generalize too much), usually you would have the war in the background, or it’s the main story: it’s about the disappeared, it might be about some event in the war, it might be about the reconstruction (the nineties created quite a lot of these hauntings themselves)—so basically they’re about hauntings from the past, and what is in the process of being erased. And then with films like yours and like Mounia’s, I was theorizing that more of those similar themes might come up.
I guess my question here is a bit more abstract. We said how Waves ’98 came out by coincidence during the 2015 crisis and protests. One way of putting it is that the wave of 1998 was reproduced in 2015. If we can picture that instead of being released in 2015, it was released in 2019 during the October revolution and uprising—let’s call it Waves 2015—how would Waves 2015, in your view, look different than Waves ’98? Maybe it would look exactly the same.
ED: From what I said before about how some new audiences saw the film a couple of months ago, and how I feel towards the film when I watch it now and think about it—I think it wouldn’t look necessarily that different. The only difference for me would be going further than where Waves ’98 ends. That’s what I’ve tried to do since then.
As you know, we went through these crises, and there’s movements of hope and change, and then that gets crushed again, and there’s a cycle that we’re always going through. I feel like today we haven’t really managed to break out of that cycle. Talking about contemporary Lebanon, contemporary life in Beirut—I don’t think it would necessarily be that different. I don’t know if I were to do it today if I would look back at the nineties specifically, or if I would look back at 2015. Because there was something very specific in the piece: the innocence of youth that the character has. And it was personal, so it came from that place—I don’t really know what a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old would feel in 2015, personally. I know how I experienced 2015, and that’s very different.
So I think the contrast maybe wouldn’t be the same. But to go back to what I heard from the students a couple of months ago: they completely identified with the same feeling. So I guess in a way, it would be the same.
But just to go back to what you mentioned about the films that came out since then: I can speak for myself; I think the reason why I choose to speak about the things that I speak about is because I felt like our lives—the younger generations than the ones that grew up in the seventies—as much as we’re aware and affected by the war, there’s also a certain reality that we inherited from the previous generations that we don’t talk about so much. I get that there are all these things from the past, but beside all these things, our present is also as chaotic, and our future seems more bleak than ever. We can also have a more broad understanding of where we are today and how our past feeds into our present and our future, because I don’t think you can disconnect one from the other.
Part of it is because the war never really ended. They just did a ceasefire and changed tactics. This period of mess or shit—we look back on it with all these explanations to try to understand and make sense of it without also taking into consideration where that continued afterwards. I don’t see the war as its own block of bad stuff—obviously it was much worse than what came afterwards—but what came afterwards also affects our daily lives, and is also born out of that. It’s important to also discuss contemporary life and what that’s like and how we go about it.
EA: Even in my own research, to be honest, the notion of a “post-war” is very contested. A more accurate term in political science would be “frozen conflict.” It’s frozen; it’s not actually gone. And if I want to be a bit more philosophical about this: I do argue in my own thesis that it’s not “war” and “post-war.” I describe it as “war/not-war.” It’s all on one concept. The only thing that defines the periods where there isn’t active conflict like 2006 or 2008—the only thing that defines those moments, those years, or those days even, is that there isn’t that violence. It’s defined by the negative; it’s defined by the absence of the violence, and it’s violence that’s expected to always come back. There’s a book by Sami Hermez where he mentions the “anticipation of violence.” There’s another academic called Joanne Randa Nucho, and she describes the temporality of it all as “war-time,” and the idea is that war-time doesn’t end during the war, but it’s something that is evoked a number of times in what is called the “post-war.”
To use a concrete example, during the protests, there were a number of supportersof political parties always saying that If you continue this way, we will have a civil war, or Let’s go back to 2008, when there was a mini-civil war. They would use the past as a threat in the present. This is the concept that’s explored, and as long as the past isn’t made peace with, so the argument goes, war-time continues. It’s always a source of—you can always use something that happened in the past to justify a politics in the present.
ED: It’s all based out on fear, anyway.
EA: Absolutely. That anticipation of violence is that: it’s the fact that you’re anticipating violence. In the present, you’re living with the fear that something might happen. You don’t know that tomorrow there will be violence, but you also don’t know that there won’t be. That sense of not-knowing is part of the reason why there is this widespread restlessness in Lebanon to this day.
ED: And I feel like the reason why it’s so potent and effective, their strategy, is also because the people know what that is. We lived it time and time again, so it’s not this abstract notion that we might be afraid of. We know that that’s like, and we’ve seen the countries around us go through these things, and it’s tough.
But at the end of the day, what came out of 2019 which can be a bit of opposition to that: I think people are more aware that somehow they share common interests, like social needs and that social rights. We know that the decision to go to war or not is largely a political one, and it’s not the people who are protesting in the October revolution who carry guns and shoot each other. So besides being this unknown, abstract fear, it’s like a threat as well. It’s a lot to ask from a society that lived through these things to accept that and take it on and be like, Fuck it, I don’t care.
EA: For sure.
I sort of want us to end on a positive-ish note. Usually it’s the book section, but in this case we’re going to have a movie section. Before getting into that section, there is a concept that I already brought up: cyclical haunting. Waves ’98 expresses this, but something that I found equally interesting is that there is sort of a hint towards the end (without giving too much away) that there might be a possible way out of that cycle, that rather than having the future being just a cycle of the past, there’s a way of having all these temporalities meet, and getting out of it that way.
I remember you reflecting on this back when we spoke a few years ago. Maybe this question is a repetition, I don’t know. Let me ask it this way, I guess: why did you feel the need to include a potential way out in the movie?
ED: It’s a way out, but what kind of way out is it? Is it a way out that’s going to make everything better? He’s looking from the viewpoint where he’s standing, and then he’s floating over the sea—is the world going to be better, or is it more some kind personal realization or personal understanding, some kind of strength? What happened throughout the film, or with me as I was working on the film, is this notion, as I said before, of contrast between despair and hope. Now I can say I don’t see it necessarily as a binary, but it came out through the process of working on the film. When I started writing and production—I only had the ending after a year and a half of production, all this animating and scenes. I didn’t know how I felt about whatever it was that I was exploring. I didn’t know how I stood.
I always had trouble going in a bubble, being completely isolated. I was never that person. But still, being in a bubble, with everything happening, I was finding difficult. I was finding myself judging my friends, and I was really in a conflictual situation in terms of how I felt about the life we have in Beirut. And through the process of working on the film, I got to a point where that question didn’t matter anymore.
So the end of the film is really a reflection of that, because a lot of the anxiety comes from feeling like you have to choose between despair and hope; you feel like you’re stuck in between, and it creates this very heavy sinking feeling where you can’t function. I don’t know, I feel like sometimes I don’t have the privilege to choose one over the other, so it’s not a happy ending where he has a way out and his life is going to be better and everyone’s life is going to be better. But maybe from where he stands, he sees things more clearly, and he finds some little peace within that.
That’s when his future joins his present. You mentioned the idea of decay and death; the future is this decaying old man that joins the present. It’s a way out, but I think it’s up to interpretation. I guess whatever your personal experience is, and how you experience the film, and where you find yourself standing at the end, is what is right. For me it was that question of nothingness.
Was that a happy note?
EA: It is a happy note, because it’s open to interpretation, so I guess it depends on the mood of the people listening.
If you don’t mind recommending a few things now?
ED: The first thing that comes to mind is a book that I’ve read a couple of times, and for som reason I have around a lot lately. It’s called Agony of Power. It’s a collection of [Jean] Baudrillard texts—it was initially unpublished texts that the editor combined, and it talks about his theories before he died, about history repeating itself and about moving from a state of domination to a state of (he calls it) total hegemony. He talks about politics and media, and it says a lot about the world that we are in today as well, so I would recommend reading that book.
In terms of films, the first that comes to mind is Persona by Ingmar Bergman. I saw this film a really long time ago; I was really young, and like a lot of films that I tend to be drawn to, it’s often the non-linear classic narrative and timeline. It’s the personal journey of an actress, and the film depicts her with her alter ego somehow, that’s played by a nurse. There’s something in how the film talks about cinema, about narratives, about personal struggles, that I find very powerful.
And the other film would probably be Caché by Michael Haneke. It’s also one of the films that influenced me when I was younger. And again, it talks a bit about media, recording, anxiety, and majorly also about hauntings from the past and how that can seep into your present and affect it. Haneke has a precise surgical way to build his films, and edits and works with the sound in a way that I find very exciting, to say the least. It’s a really powerful film and there’s a lot to say about it, so I definitely recommend watching it.
EA: Thanks for that.
ED: Have you read the book or seen the films?
EA: I have seen Persona. I haven’t seen Caché yet. I haven’t seen that and I have not read the book.
ED: You should definitely read the book, by the way.
EA: I definitely will.
On that note, thanks a lot for your time, Ely, this has been great.
ED: Thank you, Elia.
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