SYNOPSIS
A delicate yet powerful chronicle of the war that ravaged South Lebanon. Through images of scorched land and a wounded community struggling to reclaim peace, the film bears witness to the long aftermath of violence. Abbas Fahdel captures everyday moments, landscapes, and silences to poetically evoke both the lingering scars of war and the quiet resilience of life.
REVIEW
Filmed over eighteen months, Tales of the Wounded Land is an intimate, unflinching chronicle of the aftermath of war in southern Lebanon—a story of people trapped by conflict, a testament to their despair, futility, and unwavering courage. The camera moves across scorched earth and scarred bodies, backdrops to a community striving to rebuild from ruins and to find a path toward peace. In this shattered world, the landscape itself becomes a cry of anguish—at once a declaration and a poem.
At once deeply personal and inescapably political, Abbas Fahdel—director of Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015) and Tales of the Purple House (2022)—turns his own village into a stage for a haunting duet of devastation and lyricism. Guiding us through the ruins are two observers: Fahdel’s wife, artist Nour Ballouk, and their young daughter.
In a chronicle reminiscent of Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1948), the sole glimmer of hope lies in the child, who seems to embody a rare, incorruptible grace. Unlike Edmund, the hardened protagonist of Rossellini’s film, this young girl moves with an innocence impervious to the trauma surrounding her.The film leaves us with a lingering challenge: faced with these harrowing images of erasure, how will we respond to their fate—and to their pain?
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
Tales of the Wounded Land was born from the need to document the reality of war: shattered lives, razed villages, collapsed homes, but also the resilience of a fragile humanity struggling to rebuild. This was not meant to be a film about the war, but from the war, within the war, and about what it leaves behind: the rubble, of course, but also invisible fractures, tightened bonds, acts of solidarity, and the personal wounds carried deep inside, often left unspoken.
