Genre Documentary

Beirut, My City (1983)

Item: Beirut, My City
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — Beirut, My City (1983)

In the summer of 1982, Israeli forces encircled West Beirut in a siege that lasted from June through August, cutting off water, electricity and food supplies to a civilian population already exhausted by years of civil war. It was one of the defining catastrophes of the Lebanese conflict, and it produced, among other things, one of the most personal documents of that destruction: Beirut, My City, a thirty-eight-minute film completed in 1983 by the Lebanese-French filmmaker Jocelyne Saab. The film was not made from a safe editorial distance. Just four days before the siege tightened, Saab watched her own family home burn, erasing a house that had stood for a century and a half. What followed was less a commissioned piece of journalism than a private reckoning, a filmmaker turning her camera on the city she had grown up in and asking, with some urgency, how it had come to this.

Saab had already established herself as a war correspondent and documentary filmmaker of considerable courage before this film, having covered conflicts across the Middle East and Africa through the 1970s. Beirut, My City sits within that body of work not as a polished but unremarkable report, but as something rawer and more exposed than her earlier films, closer to a personal testament than a conventional documentary. The production is credited to France and Lebanon, though studio involvement is not something the record is particularly clear on. The film features Saab herself on screen alongside Roger Assaf, a Lebanese actor and theatre director who was a prominent cultural figure in Beirut at the time, and whose presence lends the film a grounding in the city's intellectual and artistic community even as that community was being physically scattered. For anyone interested in how filmmakers respond to historical catastrophe in real time, this sits naturally alongside other documentaries worth considering, such as Nom Tèw (2009) and Candomblé in Togo (1972), both of which deal in their own ways with communities under pressure and the documentary impulse to preserve what might otherwise vanish. It also shares a year with Sugar Cane Alley (1983), another French-produced film from the same period grappling with the weight of historical trauma on ordinary lives.

The film's structure, such as it is, moves through the streets and shelters of a besieged city, using place as a trigger for memory and name as a form of elegy. There is no conventional narrative scaffolding, no authoritative voice guiding you through events. Instead, the approach is closer to an accretion of images and testimonies, a method that was not entirely unusual in French documentary filmmaking of the period (you can see echoes of it in various strands of the essay-film tradition that was flourishing at the time) but which here carries a particular charge because the filmmaker is herself displaced, grieving, and present. The result is a film that resists easy categorisation and, for that reason, tends to divide viewers.

A-Z World Movie Tour Lebanon Watching Beirut My City feels less like watching a documentary and more like peering into a wound that never healed. Made in 1982, this film is raw, unfiltered, and tragically timeless. Scenes of rubble-strewn streets, families huddled in basements, and children playing barefoot among ruins could have been lifted from today’s news cycle. It’s a sobering reminder that history doesn’t just repeat... it haunts. What makes this so powerful (and so difficult to watch) are the REAL MOMENTS captured on film. Not dramatized reenactments, not carefully edited talking heads, just the raw, unflinching reality of life under siege. There are scenes here that will stay with me forever: a man sobbing over his son’s bloodied body, a woman screaming as she digs through debris for her missing daughter, footage of injuries so severe they make your stomach twist. This is a plea for memory in a world that keeps forgetting. The film doesn’t offer much in the way of narration or structure, more a collage of images and voices than a traditional documentary. That lack of framing can make it feel disjointed at times, but maybe that’s the point. How do you structure chaos? How do you narrate grief? It’s not perfect, some sequences drag, others feel incomplete, and the grainy, shaky camerawork can be hard on modern eyes. But its flaws don’t weaken it, they strengthen its authenticity. It was so raw... I had to look away at the real scenes of suffering or deceased children. That's too much for me.

For me, that combination of personal loss and political catastrophe is precisely what makes this such a difficult film to shake. I came away from it feeling the way you sometimes feel after a long conversation with someone who has been through something you cannot fully imagine: quiet, a little changed, and aware of your own limits. The footage is genuinely hard to sit with, and I won't pretend otherwise, but I think discomfort is rather the whole point. Saab wasn't making something comfortable. She was making something true. If you have any interest in what documentary filmmaking can do when it refuses to tidy itself up, this is worth your time, even when, maybe especially when, it asks more of you than you feel ready to give. Thirty-eight minutes has rarely felt so long, and so necessary.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1983 | Watched: 2025-07-08

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca