04/07/2023 - The inexhaustible spirit of Terry Gilliam’s on-set misadventures is all over Cyril Aris’s complex doc

Filmmaking is always hard, but there are times when it’s even harder. In Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano [+see also:
trailer
interview: Cyril Aris
film profile] – world-premiering in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe Competition – everything that could possibly derail a production, derails a production. It all happens at once, from heavy rains to the pandemic. It’s so bad, so hopeless, that all you can do is laugh while banging your head against the wall. But there is a darker side to Cyril Aris’s documentary, too.

In 2020, the whole world heard the explosion in the port of Beirut. So did the crew behind Mounia Akl’s Costa Brava, Lebanon [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], all ready to start filming. Everything has been “booked and greenlit”, but now their city is bleeding. They could walk away – they probably should. Instead, they keep on going.

“Lebanon is over,” says someone, and for a minute, it feels like it is. As the problems pile up, there are whispers of what everyone else is already thinking: this feels like the disaster captured in Lost in La Mancha, when Terry Gilliam was first trying to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Terry Gilliam
film profile]. “Or Apocalypse Now,” someone adds – which also scored its own you-won’t-believe-how-bad-it-was doc, Hearts of Darkness. Aris tries to cover just about everything here, from his country’s political stagnation to COVID-19 protocols, and it does feel overwhelming at times. But as a story about that weird love for cinema, the kind of love that really makes people do anything, it works wonders.

As always in these situations, black humour is what you ultimately turn to. “At least there is a breeze now,” says one person, looking at a massive gap left by the explosion. “We still have water. It just comes with a bit of glass.” But when the jokes dry up, just like the taps, there is a pressing question that needs answering: can you still make the same film, or should it be different?

They do continue, these crazy, wonderful people, even though there is no electricity after the shoot is finally done (“It’s like mixing a movie on the Titanic,” goes the summary) and the streets are full of protesters. And while Aris seems optimistic about the power of cinema, or art in general, the situation in his country is a whole other story. “Was Beirut ugly? Maybe. But it was my city,” it is said here. And someone destroyed it.

He shows people’s rage when they realise that the explosion could have been avoided, or their heartbreaking conclusion that things “will never be stable” and that maybe, instead of screaming your lungs out, it’s just better to leave. It’s a valid option, that’s for sure. But if one tiny film crew can push on with it, talking like they do “in an Antonioni movie”, laughing and crying amidst the piles of rubble, maybe others can, too.

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano was produced by German outfit Reynard Films and Lebanon’s Abbout Productions.