Genre Documentary

Children of Shatila (1998)

Item: Children of Shatila
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Children of Shatila (1998)

The Shatila refugee camp in Beirut has existed, in one form or another, since the late 1940s, when Palestinian families were displaced following the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. By the 1990s, when Lebanese-Palestinian documentary filmmaker Mai Masri turned her camera on the camp, Shatila had already endured decades of hardship that would be difficult to overstate. The massacre of September 1982, in which hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed over three days while the camp was surrounded by Israeli forces, had brought Shatila to the attention of the world in the most horrific of circumstances. Yet the camp persisted, swelling to a population of around 15,000 people crowded into what has long been described as one of Beirut's poorest urban zones. It is into this world that Children of Shatila arrives, not as a historical survey, but as a ground-level portrait of those who grew up amid the rubble and memory of all that had come before.

Masri, who was born in Lebanon and has spent much of her career documenting Palestinian life and the human consequences of conflict in the region, brings a familiarity and earned trust to her subject matter that is apparent from the outset. Produced through Nour Productions and distributed by Arab Film Distribution, the film runs to a modest fifty minutes, and its approach is shaped by a genuinely unusual filmmaking choice: two children at the centre of the story, eleven-year-old Farah and twelve-year-old Issa, are given video cameras of their own, allowing fragments of the film to emerge from their own perspectives. The result sits somewhere between traditional observational documentary and something more participatory, closer in spirit to certain 1990s works that trusted non-professional subjects to shape their own stories. If you are interested in how documentary film can work with rather than simply around its subjects, it is worth reading the site's thoughts on Salaam Cinema, another 1990s documentary that played with the relationship between filmmaker and the people in front of the lens. For Lebanese cinema with its own particular weight of historical witness, the earlier Beirut, My City offers useful comparison, made in the thick of the conflict that would eventually produce the very conditions Masri documents here.

Because the cast, in any conventional sense, is simply the community itself, there are no performances to assess and no star names to invoke. What the film offers instead is the presence of real children speaking in their own words about dispossession, memory, and the weight of an identity that has been handed to them by history rather than chosen. The film does not reconstruct or dramatise. It watches. Whether that approach produces something satisfying as a piece of cinema, or whether the intimacy compensates for what it does not attempt, is very much a question worth sitting with before you press play. For a sense of how other documentaries at the shorter, less institutional end of the form have been received on this site, the reviews of Nom Tèw and Candomblé in Togo give a reasonable idea of the kind of criteria being applied.

Children of Shatila (1998) is a raw, heartbreaking documentary that pulls you into the daily reality of life in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, home to generations of Palestinians displaced by conflict and denied return. Directed with quiet urgency, it focuses on the children: playing among rubble, attending overcrowded schools, sharing stories of loss, and dreaming of futures they may never see. Their voices are the heart of the film, innocent, resilient, yet shaped by trauma older than they are. It’s a tough watch, not because of graphic violence, but because of its emotional weight and the sheer sense of injustice that builds with every passing minute. The film doesn’t preach or editorialize, it observes. And what it shows is a cycle of displacement, poverty, and political neglect that feels tragically unbroken. You’re left with a deep sense of sorrow, not just for what these families have endured, but for how little has changed. That said, as a documentary, it lacks narrative structure and deeper context, it’s more impressionistic than investigative. Still, its power lies in its intimacy. Not perfect filmmaking, but essential viewing. A quiet cry for remembrance in a world that keeps looking away. Watching it in 2025, 30 years after many of these children grew up still stateless, makes it feel less like history and more like an ongoing wound.

I find it hard to disagree with any of that, and if anything the point about watching this in 2025 is the one that stays with me longest. The statelessness of the people in this camp is not a solved problem filed away in a history book. It is ongoing, and a fifty-minute film made nearly thirty years ago has no less to say about it now than it did then. The lack of structural rigour is a real limitation, and there are moments where you want the film to slow down and explain more of what surrounds the immediate scene. But perhaps that frustration is itself part of the point. Masri is not writing a report. She is showing you two children, and asking you to sit with what their existence means. That is a smaller thing than a definitive account, and also, somehow, a harder one to shake. Some films you watch. This one watches you back.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1998 | Watched: 2025-11-26

View on Letterboxd →

Related on Movies With Macca