13/05/2024 - The Italian director chatted with us about his documentary shot in the Shatila refugee camp following the explosion at the Port of Beirut in 2020

Between 2021 and 2023, director of photography and filmmaker Giovanni C Lorusso - originally from Sardinia and now living in Paris - shot four documentaries in various places around the world: in Johannesburg (Americano!), Gambia (Moriah) and Beirut (A Man Fell and Song of All Ends [+see also:
interview: Giovanni C Lorusso
film profile]). Song of All Ends, set in the Shatila refugee camp, is the first to be shown to the public. After its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024, the film took part in the 42nd Bellaria Film Festival, where the director spoke about his documentary revolving around a Palestinian family in mourning following the explosion at the Port of Beirut in 2020, and his working methods.

Cineuropa: What led you to discover the Shatila refugee camp?
Giovanni C Lorusso: I’ve been travelling for 25 years. Lesser-known corners of the world and events which are less important historically speaking are the ones which I’m drawn to the most. During the various waves of Covid, I searched online to see what countries I could travel to. One of them was Lebanon. I booked a ticket for 6 August 2020, a significant date because two days beforehand the explosion had taken place at the Port of Beirut. Once there, I started to take photos with my camera and 60 rolls of film, and I started to meet people. I walked, and eventually ended up at the market in Shatila. I slipped into a little alley, as you do, a little naively, and found myself in a tricky situation. The atmosphere was quite tense because people thought the attack on the port was by the Israelis, so a white man going around with a camera in his hand didn’t go down well. It was at that moment that Galeb, who’s the father of the family, was putting out the rubbish and he saw that I was in trouble. He immediately invited me into his home for some tea. All the people I meet for my films are miracles - it only takes a look. Usually that becomes the focus of my films. It’s a somewhat alternative and spiritual kind of casting process.

How much of your work would you say is fiction?
I like the sense of confusion there is, especially in films from recent years, over what’s real and what isn’t. It’s something I’ve started to play around with. Reality is my main inspiration, accounting for 80% of the film, and then I add things in from there. Houda’s story [Editor’s note: the little girl who’s killed by the explosion at the port] came from the fact that the twin children we see in the film were originally triplets, but one of them died at birth. What fascinated me was how the family was very calm when talking about it, but you could still feel something was missing in the house. A few days afterwards, I was shooting a scene where two children are playing, and through a hole I saw a little girl look at me and run away. That’s Houda who, in real-life, lost her parents. She came to me like a spirit, so I thought, why not include her in the film as a spirit? At the same time, I heard an interview on the radio with a father who spoke about the death of his daughter Alexa, who was the youngest victim of the explosion. Ultimately, it was a dot-joining process.

You haven’t looked to make an informative film. Instead, you let the images speak for themselves.
I believe in long, calm and reflective experiences, where things aren’t brutally projected onto our brains and where we take the time to understand them and to decide what interests us and what doesn’t. My approach is to sit down, look around and try to live in the moment. But I don’t want to bore viewers, so I try to make films which don’t exceed 70 minutes. I know it can be heavy-going watching films where it doesn’t feel like anything’s happening. My films barely have any camera movements, they’re made with the 28mm lens; if there’s a door, I shoot the image from the outside to get the widest view possible, I only use close-ups when they’re necessary. I feel like I’m being true to myself when I shoot like this, without preconceptions. When we’re faced with a foreign world, the first feeling we have is that it seems absurd to us. It’s a normal condition, but this changes when we take steps to accept it. Immediacy is essential for us to be able to take things as they are, even if they’re hard to digest.

(Translated from Italian)