Zinnar al-Nar: The abnormality of being normal during war

BEIRUT - Alternative Staff

March/April 2004

The events of Zinnar al-Nar, a Lebanese movie written by Rashid al-Daeef and directed by Bahij Hojeij, take place during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war. A university teacher surprised by the breakout of fire during one of his classes seeks refuge along with his students in an underground shelter.

In the dimness of the light in the place, he flirts with one of the female students. The only problem is that, because of the darkness, he couldn’t know who she was. In the next days, he goes looking for her anywhere he could in Beirut, a city in chaos at the time.

Due to the war, Dr. Chafic, the main character played by Nidaa Wakim, becomes detached from the reality around him. He has difficulties discerning the real for the unreal, facts from his hallucinations. This mental state seems also to be that of all the Lebanese people, while the civilians were tormented due to the violence of the war, the militiamen themselves were also quite lost not knowing why or for what they were fighting.

Although the characters, the events and the details of everyday life during the war are quite realistic, the overall scenario seems fabricated and rather loose. It is difficult to follow a main story, a chain of events or to conclude by a morale or image about Lebanon or its civil war.

The movie is in fact an assemblage of situations the leading faced by the main character or the characters he encounters during his daily routine. One of those characters is the concierge. Played by Hassan Farhat, he is a jack-of-all-trades whose self-confidence has been inflated by the war. This stereotype surfaced during that period and is still present in today’s society as a legacy from the conflict.

An interesting situation Dr. Chafic faces is his arrest at a checkpoint held by local militiamen. He is interrogated somehow violently and then released without really understanding why. But throughout this experience, he remained dazzled, drugged and disconnected from his surrounding.

This state of collective depression reaches also another professor who becomes unreasonably cautious about cleanliness due to a disease she contracted called in Arabic Zinnar al-Nar, literally “the belt of fire,” a metaphor of the hostilities. Another woman is persuaded that Chafic killed her son after kidnapping him.

While the sorrows of the Lebanese people are exposed, our hero survives only due to his detachment and passiveness, a symbol for immigration and refusal for the state of things, but mostly a determination to look elsewhere: towards love and hope.