ṭale‘ ‘a (طاِلع عَ)[masculine] – ṭal‘a ‘a ((طالْعة عَ [feminine] – ṭal‘in ‘a (طالْعين عَ) [plural]
Colloquially, the Arabic term for going up is commonly used in Lebanon (and a few other neighboring Arab countries) as a way of expressing, specifically, leaving towards a destination. Mostly, to communicate taking a trip from a city/village to another city/village in the country.
We are not going to resist the urge to adjoin the connotation of transcendence to the expression ṭale‘ ‘a (again, going up towards) with the upcoming film series that will be screened, as part of the South Lebanon instalment of our program The Mapping Snail, at Cinemateket Trondheim.
South Lebanon has stood out, both in the country and the region, as a place of resistance against Israeli Zionist military expansionism, for more than 40 years now. As we put the last touches on this text, in February 2025, Israel is supposed to withdraw from all of the South. Has it really, while troops remain in ‘5 points’ at the borders? Is Israel ‘done’ infringing on these lands?
While going up to the South (ṭal‘in ‘al jnoub), the residents of South Lebanon have decades-long found themselves up against repetitive invasions (and attempts). “What are we up against?”, the people of the South ask, every decade or two.
Inhabitants of South Lebanon have for some time designated themselves as Southerners. There is much more to what may first appear as a proud utterance from a distinct community, with the aim of standing out from the rest of the country. ‘Lebanese Southerners’ has also been an unfortunate(?), discriminatory – but also, later on, counter-discriminatory, as claimed by the Southerners – term. A (necessary?) consequent of:
Southerners have been up against not only Israel since even before 1978 (the 1948 massacre of Houla, among many others), but up against Lebanese State-led abandonment as well. The official front page newspaper from the latter, on the eve of the Houla massacre – where around 70 or 80 people were slain – figured the following baffling title: “Events in the village Houla, in the South”.
In the recent 2024 Israeli war on Lebanon and the South, a plaque in Houla commemorating this massacre was defaced by members of the Golani brigade with the words “a good Shi’ite is a dead Shi’ite”, signed with a Star of David.
In Maroun Bagdadi’s The Most Beautiful of All Mothers (1978), it can be inferred from the testimonies concerning the fallen fighters – testimonies that are ‘montaged’ together as a single-seam narrative, making it at first seem like a single, collective remembrance of one fighter – by various parents, siblings, lovers, etc. that the South-based fighters were, unbkenownst to their close relatives, up to (no) good. A young woman had noticed her brother’s majorly changed behavior towards her, a few days before he was killed in battle.
One can also sense in a scene the surprise of a mother when, after receiving the news of her son’s departure, she finds out that he was all along an active fighter in the Communist Action Organization (CAOL). The mother’s only suspicion was that he was merely up to something. Having been seen leaving the house with a rifle, and to keep it up covertly, the son had misled her by saying he was going over his sister’s house to guard it.
During the 2024 military aggression on Lebanon (and brutally on the South), even close friends of Southern fighters – friends who visited them often, and saw a ‘normal’ family household – were likewise totally unsuspecting of their involvement in armed resistance.
This Israeli invasion attempt of South Lebanon was operated by the most massive and savage war machine yet, enabled and funded by ‘big’ states, against the approx. 10,500 km2 country. A failed invasion, against all odds.
The premise for the text above is inspired by artists Jayce Salloum and Walid Raad’s ‘videotape’ Up to the South. With the recent Israeli assaults on Lebanon, we find ourselves at Cinemateket Trondheim going back to this singular work from 1993, borrowing its title for this chapter of screenings that deal with Israel’s incursions, Southern-based youth resistance, and copings/reflections in the aftermaths of the occupation’s withdrawals from South Lebanon.
Cinemateket Trondheim is presenting 5 cinematic and video works (the videos being both cinematic and against cinema):
While Bagdadi and the Masri-Chamoun duo resort to a rather traditional approach to ‘documentaring’ South Lebanon (though one not without subversions), Salloum and Raad, in Up to the South, employ a critical treatment of the sensitivities around “terrorism, colonialism, occupation, resistance, collaboration, experts, spokespeople, leadership, the land, etc.”, disputing in their core “the history and structure of the documentary genre specifically in regards to the representation of other cultures by the West in documentary, ethnography and anthropological practice”.
– Oscar Debs, February 2025
