Rating: NR | Runtime: 92 minutes
Release Date: August 2nd, 2023 (Germany)
Studio: ARTE
Director(s): Garry Keane & Stephen Gerard Kelly

It’s like we’re invisible.

I’ve always heard that Beirut, Lebanon is a beautiful, modern city—the likes of which “surprises” people when they get off the plane assuming (in a mostly anti-Arab, racist way) that they’ll see poverty wherever they look. That beauty, like in many other places, however, comes at a cost. Especially in a country that has seen decades of government corruption making it so the already damning statistic of 40% of Lebanese residents living in poverty could recently balloon to 80%.

Directors Stephen Gerard Kelly and Garry Keane’s In the Shadow of Beirut looks to shine a light on that cost in the form of a garbage-riddled section of land just five kilometers outside Beirut proper known as Sabra and Shatila. The site of a Muslim massacre in 1982 at the hands of Catholic Lebanese with the help of the Israeli army, the settlement is currently an over-stuffed and under-funded slum inhabited by a mix of survivors, original Palestinian descendants, and Syrian refugees who fled ISIS.

By following four families during the course of five years, the documentary proves a damning indictment on living conditions made increasingly worse with every new law change. Most of the residents aren’t even citizens either because their fathers aren’t Lebanese (a Lebanese mother isn’t enough) or because they are foreigners with no clear path towards citizenship. As such, they cannot apply for driver’s licenses or permits. They cannot apply for jobs necessary to afford educations for their children. It becomes a vicious cycle of pain and suffering, crime and hopelessness.

The film’s subjects are determined to persevere nonetheless. These are generous souls trying their best to ensure better futures for their kids. Maybe that means marrying off daughters at thirteen or putting ten-year-old boys to work earning $3 US for a fourteen-hour day. Maybe it means living amongst rats and water-logged circuit breakers ready to blow. At the end of the day, these men and women are surviving despite their circumstances. Like so many impoverished people around the world, love ultimately sustains their humanity. They simply need those in power to remember their own.

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Abu Ahmad in IN THE SHADOW OF BEIRUT.