The Unmarked Burial Sites in Lebanon

The Soil and the Sea

In Lebanon there are more than 100 untouched mass graves dating back from the Civil War, and thousands of families awaiting a missing relative or at least a bone to bury. The documentary The Soil and the Sea unveils the violence lying beneath a garden, a school, a cafe, a hotel, and other unremarkable landscapes. As the camera interrogates these everyday spaces, voices fill them with erased stories. After screening the documentary, we will have a discussion with film director Daniele Rugo, Yara El Murr and Eleri Connick.

There will be a full screening of the film The Soil and the Sea of 73 minutes, followed by a Q&A with Daniele Rugo (the director) and Yara El Murr, who will both join us virtually.

In Lebanon, there are indications of the existence of more than a hundred gravesites dating back to the 1975-1990 war. Some of these sites could potentially reveal crucial details about the thousands of people who were forcibly disappeared during the war. With each passing year, preserving evidence that could clear up the fate of the missing becomes harder. Witnesses are growing old, and the burial sites are steadily being destroyed.

The documentary is built by a series of fragments held together in a circular structure, from the sea to the sea. Landscapes and testimonies. We will not see faces, only hear voices. The main reason for this being that this is a film about disappearance; something that haunts the image, a visibility yet to be achieved. Furthermore, it is a film about places, places that guard massacres and killings. They guard these places in the sense that they keep them, they are the bearers of evidence. The voices of survivors, perpetrators, and local residents tell stories of violence and enforced disappearances. The camera moves slowly, or not at all, across landscapes that seem to say nothing about these crimes. Rural or urban landscapes that are unremarkable, mundane solitary or crowded, densely built or barren, but all similarly silent about the bodies and bones that they guard.

The camera says: life carries on
The voices say: stop! It can’t carry on

About the speakers

Daniele Rugo is an award winning filmmaker and Professor of Film at Brunel University London. His previous film About a War (2019, co-directed with Abi Weaver), explores social change through the stories of former militiamen from Lebanon’s civil war. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Yara El Murr is an award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker covering issues of identity, migration, climate, labor and social issues.

Eleri Connick (moderator) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam’s School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. She was the PhD Fellow at Darat al Funun (Amman) February 2023 – July 2023. Her doctoral project titled: “The Materiality of Exile in Jordan and Lebanon: The Palestinian House”, proposes a radical conceptualisation of home and all that it can provoke to ground her work both conceptually and methodologically.