In 1980 Muhammad Malas began research for a documentary about Palestinians in the refugee camps of Lebanon. Malas, who had received training in filmmaking at the All Soviet Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, had already worked for a decade directing documentaries for Syrian television. He researched and filmed in Lebanon during long visits in 1980 and 1981, but his work was interrupted by the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1981 and 1982 and the Camps War that raged in the refugee camps of the southern suburbs of Beirut in the mid-1980s. Al-Manam (The Dream) was finally completed in 1987. It was highly acclaimed in a few venues in Europe and the Arab world, but was not widely released. Over the years the film has screened at festivals here and there, but otherwise has been difficult to see and impossible to purchase. Now, The Dream has finally been released on DVD by mec film, and an English language translation of the diary Malas kept while filming in 1980–81 and which appeared in Arabic in 1991 has been published by the American University in Cairo Press. The near simultaneous release of these two works, a formally important work of Arab cinema and a detailed accounting of the thoughts of the filmmaker as he conceptualized that work, is an exciting development for Arab film studies—a boon to both scholarship and classroom teaching.
When Malas began working on The Dream in 1980, Palestinians had been making films about themselves and their national liberation movement for more than a decade. That struggle had become embroiled in the Lebanese civil war, significantly exacerbating the precarity of Palestinians in Lebanon and their vulnerability to violence. However, Malas did not want to focus on the violence and destruction that was so prevalent in existing documentaries about the Palestinians. Seeking the essence of what it meant to be a Palestinian at that time—both vulnerable to violence but also the protagonist of the failing political movement that had carried the hopes of the Arab left since the late 1960s—Malas decided to focus not on people's lived experiences, but on their dreams, filming Palestinians in their homes and work environments as they testified not to atrocities, but to the images and narratives that filled their sleep.
As the violence inflicted upon Palestinians in Lebanon in the mid-1980s escalated and the Palestinian revolution was destroyed, Malas became paralyzed by despair, but finally felt a need to use his material to make a film that would invest the desperate present of the late 1980s with hope. His film developed an elegiac quality, becoming, in his words, “a dream about dreams that are now a memory of a dream” (137).
The dreams that Malas includes in his film are richly varied. People dream of violence, prison, and dead loved ones. They dream of destroyed houses and forced relocation. Many people dream of Arab and Palestinian political leaders, and one woman dreams of carrying out a coup d'etat. The dreams are interspersed with short personal histories and anecdotes, most of which revolve around atrocities that the narrators or their family members have endured. However, perhaps because so much of the film consists of dreams rather than real stories, or perhaps because of the constructed contexts in which Malas filmed the interviews (most of the dreams were narrated to Malas first during his research, and then elicited again later in staged settings during the filming), interviewees speak with calm wonder, rather than with the anger, fear, indignation, or sadness with which testimony about atrocities are often made. Moreover, the dreams are, not surprisingly, often expressions of desires; a woman dreams of taking a Lebanese friend on a tour of Palestine, a young man says that from his mountain post he can see the lights of Palestinian towns, but in his dreams he sees the towns themselves “just like the camps.” The dreams, though illogical, are nonetheless manifestations of a truth in the way that they combine both the difficulties people face and their hopes. In one young woman's dream, water and electricity turn on whenever Muhammad, a martyred family member, enters her home. In another, a woman who sees a cockfight is told that the roosters are fighting to liberate Palestine. A third woman, worried about hurt feelings, dreams of tearing down a martyr's posters when the man returns to life.
Beautifully shot, evocative, and elegiac, The Dream offers viewers neither facts about life for Palestinians in Lebanon and their military and political institutions nor a historical narrative. Instead, it affectively engages with pain and suffering that are delicately protected by the surrealism of the dream narratives. Viewed more than 30 years after its completion, the film stands as a potent documentation of a structure of feeling that at one time unified Arab political and intellectual life and the Palestinian every day—one characterized paradoxically by hope and loss, resilience and resignation, naiveté and political awareness born of traumatic experience.
Malas's film diary works as an extension of his film. Much of the book consists of transcriptions of the dreams themselves, which are contextualized within Malas's daily schedule and information about his research and filming methods, the relationships he builds with his fixers and filmed subjects, and current events. As such, the book is a rare, intimate glimpse into the working methods of one of the most accomplished filmmakers from the Arab world. Sonia Farid's translation is a pleasure to read—both accurate and idiomatic in English. The glossary and notes provided by editor Samirah Alkassem are indispensable to readers new to the subject and helpful even to informed readers unfamiliar with the micro-geography of Beirut and its environs.
