Country: Libya
Year: 2017
Running Time: 11:15 minutes
Genre: Drama
Written and Directed by: Faraj Meayouf
Screenings: Alexandria International Film Festival for Mediterranean Countries, Oran International Arab Film Festival, Luxor African Film Festival, Middle East & North Africa Film Festival in the Netherlands.
Evaluation: Worth Watching
1
It is with the most profound regret that we, as cinephiles, are unable to watch most modern Libyan films, while the cinema of the entire planet, from all eras, is readily accessible. And on the rare occasion one of us gets lucky and snags a film here or there, these works often leave us disappointed when viewed in the context of a “global” cinema that draws from a creative spirit concerned only with relentlessly exploring the boundaries of the medium and what lies beyond.
We care deeply about the historical achievement of the event itself; the mere production of a film in Libya is a miracle that appears two or three times a year. These miracles almost always follow the straight and narrow path of the short film. It is relatively easier and cheaper.
In the aftermath of COVID-19, I became acquainted with the work of the young director Faraj Meayouf, who entered the world of cinema through its narrowest door: immediate, on-the-spot experimentation, filming whatever could be filmed with little regard for the future of his footage.
During the 2011 uprising, most Libyan filmmakers turned to documenting the war in long and short documentaries, or in narrative shorts. (As I’ve discussed with my colleagues at the Libya Film Institute, the production of a feature-length narrative film has become an event awaited with the same anticipation some have for the Mahdi and Godot combined). Our film here, however, is not concerned with current headlines, nor with “educating” the world about Libya’s recent history, a path many Libyan filmmakers now take. And I say “filmmakers” to emphasize those who take it upon themselves to write, film, and edit their own work.
Instead, this film exposes a deep wound in the body of Libyan society. In doing so, it aims to raise awareness without resorting to guidance or preaching, using a simple directorial approach that doesn’t ask much of its actors, shot in the natural light of day.
Regarding the film’s production, Faraj tells me it took shape after he read the memoirs of Abdullah Saleh (From School to the Battlefield). Mr. Abdullah is a Libyan citizen from Murzuq who, in the 1980s, was taken from his high school with his classmates to the front lines of the war with neighboring Chad. (We hear a different dialect in the film, not that of Murzuq, for death does not recognize dialects). We are not concerned here with the book’s many details or Abdullah’s harsh story, that is for another article. What matters here is the film’s work, over the course of nine minutes, on flashes from the lives of these doomed youths and the echoes left behind by the survivors.
Fair warning, spoilers ahead!
2
In the opening shots, we hear a young man on the phone with his lover. He tells her he is about to finish high school and will then ask her family for her hand in marriage. But if her family is in a hurry, he says, then everything is in the hands of fate. It’s an old story, one we’ve seen on late-night television and read in the pages of “social” literature. But this conversation is taking place in a different orbit, one we come to understand in installments, sometimes through image, sometimes through sound.
We move from the sound of melodrama to the image of realism: a dilapidated boys’ school, a game of football, a mathematics class. A school guard watches over every movement in the courtyard, and sometimes, over a few stray thoughts. The sound of the radio in the guard’s room accompanies the math lesson: a citizen calls in, asking about the fate of his son who disappeared a year ago. Then, news arrives from the administration for the math teacher: tell the students to prepare for a school trip.
Sound and image finally merge in a scene where the trip’s bus driver reads a newspaper featuring the “battles of Nasser’s revolution,” while a radio announcer declares news of supposed victories on the front lines after playing the Jamahiriya’s national anthem. In my opinion, this is the film’s weakest scene; Anachronisms are concocted (Nasser’s presence in the 1980s) in a shot already saturated with symbols (the fervor of the state media versus its eventual defeat).
But we understand that short filmmakers are keen to condense meaning, and in that condensation often lies the empty symbolism I mentioned in the title. Film 205 transcends this symbolism. It leaps over its own misstep and gives more space to the teenagers’ chatter, from the secrets of their love lives to their football games – This is an approach Gus Van Sant took in his 2003 masterpiece, Elephant, which depicted the lives of high school students just before they were murdered by a classmate – by focusing on this, Meayouf places his teenagers at the center of attention, before the news of the war and its circumstances. This focus is paralleled by a shot of the teenagers’ parents, standing at the school gate like someone at a prison gate, begging for a visit through connections.
The guard plays cards alone, accompanied by the radio, which shifts from the violence of war propaganda to the weariness of families suspended in the purgatory of receiving news, not knowing the fate of their sons who were alive only yesterday. Their only aim is to know their fate for certain, even if it comes in the form of bones that point to a missing body.
The guard locks up the school, in the presence of abandoned notebooks, while we see the students sitting in a military plane.
The lightness of memory can be as bearable as its weight. With its lightness, we might obscure the truth of our emotions, especially towards the dead. With its weight, we are sometimes dragged into sanctifying them. And while we set aside the obvious literary reference to Kundera’s masterpiece, we consider the substance of Film 205: a modest film that thinks of its dead as it thinks of its living, without sanctifying or judging them.
If we are to conclude by speaking of sanctification and judgment, we can also speak of great films that did not adopt “neutrality” in their content—from Godard’s Maoist films, to the provocations of Nagisa Oshima in the far east of Japan, to the revolutionary Cinema Novo of Glauber Rocha in Brazil, the far west of the globe. With these examples, we are reminded that neutral cinema is not necessarily great cinema. Many Libyan filmmakers have become obsessed with the idea of neutrality, producing political films with no political dimension, bland works that present symbols instead of people: the dyer and the tanner, the prisoner and the guard.
Critics have long debated the filmmaker’s intention: does the director’s intent in shooting this or that scene matter? We are not concerned with Meayouf’s intention in filming his students, but with the audience’s reception of the result.
This is how the contours of Film 205 appear, both before and after symbolism. The number 205 refers to the 205 students who were dragged into the war. Out of this tragedy, the script and directorial style struggle between austerity and saturation, stumbling at times and soaring at others. And this, under miserable filming conditions (in addition to relying on personal camera equipment, the elements of the school were gathered from various sources, not to mention the painstaking coordination with authorities).
At the end of the shoot, and at the end of the viewing, 205 reveals itself to be a necessary disruption in the system of Libyan cinematic expression. It is not necessarily a revolutionary film, but in its nine minutes, it creates a prelude to a “national” cinema that masters the many tools of filmmaking without preaching or wallowing in melodrama, using the simplest of words and the most straightforward of shots.
Saad Elasha
