A Man Fell, the doc film in Sabra's Gaza Hospital in Venice. A story of Palestinian pain and resistance

In the complex contemporary cinematic landscape, recounting the suffering and resistance of the Palestinian people, especially in this day and age, is an arduous task. It requires a narrative that combines extreme sensitivity and a creative vision capable of penetrating the most intimate folds of reality. Director Giovanni C. Lorusso, with A Man Fell, presented as part of Venice Days, an autonomous and parallel section of the Venice International Film Festival, succeeds in achieving this difficult objective with a documentary film shot in Sabra, Lebanon, a city inextricably linked to the tragic 1982 massacre perpetrated by the Lebanese Phalange and the Israeli army, which caused the death of over 3,000 Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites.

In this context of devastation and suffering, stood the Gaza Hospital, once the Palestine Liberation Organisation's hospital, which in the film becomes a powerful symbol, capable of encapsulating the very essence of human despair and resilience. ‘The former Gaza Hospital located in the heart of the Sabra refugee camp,’ the director explains, ’is not simply a film set, on the contrary, it is one of the film's protagonists. This imposing abandoned building, once a refuge and hope for thousands of Palestinians, is now a monument to the decay and precariousness of life in the refugee camps. Its walls, corroded and marked by time, tell stories of suffering and resistance, reflecting the condition of a people forced to struggle every day against an uncertain and oppressive destiny’.

The decision to film the building in such a way as to bring out its oppressive nature, with light that seems trapped in the shadows, perfectly reflects the condition of the inhabitants. The natural light that penetrates only from the upper floors creates a sharp contrast with the darkness of the interior spaces, a dichotomy that becomes a metaphor for the inhabitants' state of mind: light, symbol of hope and possibility, is constantly threatened by shadow, emblem of desolation and oppressive reality. ‘In A Man Fell,’ Lorusso continues, ’the main source of inspiration was the entire literary work of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, and some traces of his stories are also present in the film. It all started almost by chance during my fourth trip to Lebanon, after I met Yasser Al Ali, a barber from Sabra, who invited me to visit the Gaza Building, where he lived with his three sons. One evening, upon entering the building, he said to me: ‘Welcome to hell, Gio’. I then spent 25 days there, with the aim of portraying the energy and resistance of this symbolic place of the Palestinian condition’.

One of the director's most significant choices was to tell the story through the eyes of a child, the young Arafat: the innocent and pure perspective of an 11-year-old offer a powerful contrast to the harsh reality of the camp. Arafat's spontaneity and sincerity during filming surprised Lorusso himself, who was initially sceptical about the idea of having a child as a protagonist. But it is precisely this narrative choice that makes A Man Fell a work capable of touching the spectator, allowing him to approach the harsh reality of the camp through a mix of wonder and anguish. And then the image of the falling man, an episode that really happened during filming and documented by amateur videos of the camp inhabitants, is deeply intertwined with the narrative of the Palestinian resistance.

This tragic event has been integrated into the film as a powerful metaphor for the desperation and desire to escape that characterises life in the former Gaza Hospital. The fall thus becomes a symbol of the constant struggle between the hope for a better life and the oppressive reality that seems to leave no way out.

The making of A Man Fell, entailed several technical and creative challenges: the limited availability of electricity and the need to transport equipment through military check-points made the production of the film an arduous undertaking. However, these difficulties also allowed the director to develop a more immediate and natural approach to filming, helping to create an authentic and respectful portrait of life in the former Gaza Hospital. The result is a film that not only informs, but also deeply touches the viewer, offering a glimpse of a reality that is often ignored.
A Man Fell, produced by Labo Gcl, Primate and Revok, under the patronage of Amnesty International Italy, is not only a film about Palestinian suffering, but a reflection on the human condition in situations of extreme deprivation and despair. Giovanni Lorusso has managed to balance the need to tell a powerful story with respect for the people involved, creating a work that not only informs, but also deeply touches those who witness it.

‘A Man Fell’ film by Giovanni C. Lorusso: the place of the invisible

Oubliette Magazine 06/09/2024 0
In the succession of previews for Venice Days at the 81st Venice Film Festival, a film dedicated to the passive resistance of the Palestinian condition: ‘A Man Fell’ directed by Giovanni C. Lorusso

The cast of the film ‘A Man Fell’ includes: Arafat Yasser Al Ali, Muhammad Ramzi, Zayed, Jinen Al Ali, Jihad Khalaf Esa, Nour Amjad Al Nasim, M Obama, Muhammad Esam Ghannam, BGYBissan Yasser Al Ali.

A seventy-minute work made under the patronage of Amnesty International Italia that catapults the spectator into a microcosm bound in the heart of Sabra, Palestine, in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, where the massacre of Sabra and Shatila took place in 1982. This is precisely where the Gaza Hospital, a hospital of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, came to an improper end and was converted into a shelter with dilapidated premises.

‘It was the best hospital in the world, before the Israelis came. They were all driven out to live in the Gaza Building. Many people were born and died in this building.’ - ‘A Man Fell’

The protagonist is Arafat: the frame is for him, his face, his eyes, the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy who will reflect to our eyes the life inside the Gaza building in the unfolding of what should be a ‘normal’ day of everyday life spent among that rubble, already rubble not walls.

A former hospital gutted of its essence and purpose as well as the lives of those relegated to living inside this structure, the place of the invisible. Already invisible, because one does not want to perceive with sight the dimension of that cruel reality, which passes unnoticed, almost with a slight accent of inattention, because everyone is overwhelmed by the routine of everyday life.

But can such a reality go unnoticed? Certainly not invisibly for director Giovanni C. Lorusso, who discreetly managed to capture what one does not want to see, to make one aware and remember an omitted reality.

‘A Man Fell‘: a man fell, this is the event that is spoken of by word of mouth that leads to the almost legendary narration of an event to which no one can attribute cause and manner, but it did happen and between the passage from one floor to another in the interlude of the adults’ reaction, the lives of the children inside the Gaza are intertwined. Everyday gestures common to all, from arranging a tuft of hair behind the ear, to wanting to decorate the window sill with flowers, to smoking a cigarette or having dinner, for many, the only companion is the mobile phone, which rather than being a communication tool functions as a radio or video.

In this filthy, worn-out context, abandoned to dilapidation, glimmers of light can be glimpsed, the external and natural light of the sky, which crosses those open walls and illuminates some of the interior spaces, spaces that give a glimpse of a white city, animated by a population so distant but also so close.

For a few moments, a flock flies high in the sky, giving a state of lightness and well-being, but there is one detail to pay attention to, a detail that belongs to their habits: when a bird changes trajectory or speed, its neighbours imitate it and the whole group adapts to the change.

Arafat lives his little adventure in the flat passage of the day, between the various encounters inside the building, now lived as a ward, a lost little town, several times he goes down the stairs with his companion of adventure and games, he wants to discover what is hidden in the basement, but for this he needs a torch, also a small source of light, a chink, which he manages to conquer with dexterity to complete his mission.

And while he involved in his exploration showed us little girls singing, drawing on the walls, playing and jumping at the rope, which is no rope, he leaves us with an end-of-day reflection of his own:

‘‘One day we will get out of here’ - ‘Let's hope so!’’ - ‘A Man Fell’

A film that needs no special effects or lavish sets, because the reality of the place is far more imposing than any reconstruction, in the reality of places that were protagonists of tragic events, imposing among the rubble and in the symbolism of what it represents.

The documentary by Giovanni C. Lorusso's ‘A Man Fell’ was included in the programming of Venice Days, Venetian Nights 2024, as part of the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

The documentary depicts daily life in the ‘Gaza Hospital’ known as the ‘Gaza Building’: a hospital in the late 1970s and now a place of refuge and survival for generations of displaced persons and Palestinian refugees. Here lives the film's protagonist, 11-year-old Arafat, who spends his time in the ruins of the building's eleven floors together with his friend Muhammad, thinking about how to explore the forbidden basement, find something to do, survive.

This building, moreover, is not just anywhere. It is in Sabra, Lebanon, notorious because of the 1982 massacre, a place where past and recent events tragically overlap to the drama of today.

The film received the patronage of Amnesty International Italy with these motivations:

‘Sabra is a tragically important place for those concerned with human rights: associated with Shatila, it recalls the ferocious and unpunished massacre of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children that took place in 1982. In an abandoned building in Sabra, three, if not four generations of Palestinians live left to their own devices, amid mute memories that clench between the gazes of elderly women and a present of hardship, ingenuity to survive and little hope for the future. In these times of unprecedented massacres of the Palestinian population, History calls to mind, whoever will, that that building in Sabra would have had a very different destination without the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during and after the birth of Israel and following the occupation of 1967.’

Of the Eternal Palestinian Diaspora

The first portion of Darkness is the densest, Dear, After that, the Light begins to flicker, Emily Dickinson

A motionless, separate time, where the past does not pass and the elsewhere appears only imagined through the interstices of the walls from which filters what will never be seen or framed: Arafat, the child who ascends and descends the stairs of an abandoned building, eleven floors of history, moves in the dark. In the fixed shots of A man fell, the protagonist is the blackness of absence and staticity, a liminal place of darkness - Yasser Al Ali says to the director, accompanying him to the Gaza Hospital: ‘Welcome to hell, Gio’ - and the darkness is only interrupted by the little light filtering through the windows.

Sabra, Lebanon, an old building dismantled in the late 1970s, first a PLO hospital, then a place of refuge for Palestinians after the 1982 massacre, the majority of whom have no citizenship and no access to basic services for the possibility of a dignified life, unable to own property, unable to have a secure job. The stairs on which the camera lingers are moved only by the bodies of a few souls in the half-light: children jumping, a brief dance, the dimension of play without an object, subjects removed from existence, the reflection of their legs on the wet puddles of the building, an adult wandering around looking for three lost cards from a deck, a little girl from whose pencils no colour comes out: because everything is a metaphor for what is lost, for what cannot be given or pronounced. And two red threads: the child's curiosity about the dungeon, and the man who fell from the building a few days before the filming, the leap or fall of which we cannot know except for brief hints, hypotheses, a few words.
And it is also the word/voice that arrives only in places, to sketch the mass of silence that intertwines with the dense blacks of abandonment, making them reverberate.

The first shot of Arafat is of the child sitting on an old abandoned armchair, the child gets up: the armchair remains empty, the eye of the camera stops in this void. Giovanni Lorusso delineates the grey area of the condition of the inhabitants of the Gaza Hospital through the metaphorical, which we also find in a French off-screen voice coming perhaps from a radio or television: the woman turns to someone, she says ‘you think the bars you live in are bouquets of flowers’.

But there is no flower because there is no earth but an earth from which one is rejected.

Of the building, the exterior is never visible, an exterior that carries within it a scarred history, and after Arafat and his friend Muhammed's visit to the basement, when they meet a child who lives there (there is only ‘sex, drugs and dead people there, a man will say to his companion) appears as the only hint of the building's history, telling of those who sold their fathers' blood, the fear of being found, the excavation of the corridors leading to Jerusalem and other cities, Arafat says to his friend Muhammed, sitting among the ruins of the terrace: tomorrow we leave here.

A tomorrow that adults perhaps no longer believe in: because if desire can only take shape where there is an object, here the object is existence itself. An existence that has been bleeding for decades and stretching to an infinite bleeding, only ended by the draining of itself.

‘A Man Fell’ Daily life at Gaza Hospital
The film directed by Giovanni C. Lorusso, co-written with Yasser Kamal Al Ali is present at Venice Days

Among the films in the Venice Days programme, an autonomous and parallel section of the Venice International Film Festival, is the documentary directed by Giovanni C. Lorusso, co-written with Yasser Kamal Al Ali, A Man Fell is a Labo GCL, Primates, Revok production, under the patronage of Amnesty International Italy.

Daily life in Gaza Hospital, known as Gaza Buildind, a hospital in the late 1960s and now a place of refuge and survival for generations of displaced Palestinians and refugees.

The plot of A Man Fell
Sabra, in Lebanon, is notorious because of the massacre carried out in 1982 by the Lebanese Phalange and the Israeli army to kill Palestinian citizens and Lebanese Shiites, leaving over three thousand victims. The Gaza Hospital stands here, becoming a symbol of the survival of Palestinians, who still find refuge there. In the Gaza Building lives the protagonist of A Man Fell, 11-year-old Arafat, who spends his time among the ruins of the building's eleven floors. Together with his friend Muhammad, he thinks about how to explore the forbidden basement, where ‘there is only sex, drugs and death’, while everyone in the building talks about the probably false story of a man who allegedly fell from the fourth floor of that same building for unknown reasons.

A tragically important place
‘As with my previous works, I let my instincts and surroundings define the direction. After five days of visiting the different flats, where many were initially reluctant to get involved, Yasser and I decided to develop a film based on the seemingly unimportant stories of the building, through the eyes of the young Arafat. With equipment stripped to the bone, we were able to move between the eleven floors of the building, where we captured unexpected moments and other preparations together with the boys.’

These are the words of Giovanni C. Lorusso, the director of A Man Fell, who debuted with his first film Song of All Ends, which won an award at the African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival in Milan.

With this his latest documentary film, Lorusso has pursued a discourse that runs on two parallel tracks. Alongside his work as a filmmaker, in fact, the director had to, by necessity and choice, combine a procedure as an anthropologist, making himself accepted by the community that is the film's protagonist.

A Man Fell has received the patronage of Amnesty International Italy, because it deals with Sabra, a tragically important place for those dealing with human rights.

Venice 81 - A Man Fell and the Aestheticizing Palestinian Survival

At the 81st Venice International Film Festival, not a few films feel the urgency to talk about the political and humanitarian crises of the present. A Man Fell, the second feature by Sardinian director Giovanni C. Lorusso, presented at the Venice Days 2024 Venice Nights, is among them. Together with another film in the Official Selection, namely Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, the new work by Göran Olsson presented Out of Competition, Lorusso's film in fact explores the Palestinian question in its present state, in this specific case by showing, through very careful photography and direction, the living conditions of Palestinian exiles in Lebanon.

Life in the microcosm of the Gaza Hospital
At the centre of A Man Fell is the Gaza Hospital in Sabra, Beirut, an old Palestinian Liberation Organisation hospital that has over the years become a place of refuge for Palestinian families who survived the Sabra massacre in the 1980s. The film recounts everyday life inside this place through a day in the life of a young resident of the building, 11-year-old Arafat, who spends his time between playing a game, running errands for the other residents and pure survival.

The everyday life witnessed by the young protagonist of A Man Fell is made up of both misery and poverty - the destitute conditions in which the residents of the Gaza Hospital live are often remarked upon in the places presented in the film, full of dirt and piles of old objects, and in the characters' own living conditions, often forced to make do with what they have to survive - as well as small moments of escapism, represented by music listened to on the mobile phone, a cigarette, a game or a story that travels fast among all the tenants of a thief who may have fallen from the fourth floor of the building after trying to rob a woman.What is presented in A Man Fell is to all intents and purposes a microcosm of people and characters living inside this building, each one trying to survive as best he or she can - seeking an apparent normality in everyday gestures, through the use of psychotropic substances and/or small everyday distractions (a piece of gossip, a piece of music, a drawing).

It is precisely in these gestures, in these minutiae, that it is possible to see the great dignity of these people but at the same time their need to live, even in such adverse conditions for them. In filming these minutiae, director Lorusso shows his interest in narrating and showing what it means for the Palestinian population to live in a place that is hostile to them. The result of this interest is a film that hybridises the documentary with a superstructure of fiction, which, however, although very well conceived in several moments of A Man Fell, does not seem to have been fully exploited to understand and deepen the living conditions of the hospital's inhabitants.

The Caravaggesque photography of A Man Fell
The most interesting elements of A Man Fell are the direction and cinematography. In fact, the work as a whole is extremely well-rendered (as can already be seen from the trailer and these stills from the film) from an aesthetic point of view. Impeccable framing and careful lighting cuts make the sixty-nine minutes of viewing the film certainly a remarkable visual experience.

Among the most interesting elements in this respect are the windows, the only real entry points for light inside the complex. The work done in A Man Fell on the windows is significant both on a photographic level - the light that enters through them, with an almost Caravaggio-esque quality in certain shots, irradiates the environments and characters, creating truly remarkable chiaroscuro effects, shots that are easy to read despite the rampant blackness on the screen; and on a directorial and thematic level - the entry of these enormous amounts of light into the paintings ends up cancelling out what is outside them: the outside world cannot even enter the building through a window, which in its whiteness creates an almost claustrophobic atmosphere.

This attention to photography and aesthetics in A Man Fell, however, inevitably raises an ethical question for the viewer: how morally right is it to show living conditions such as those portrayed in this film in an aesthetically pleasing manner? This question is certainly not a new one among cinephiles, critics and scholars: just four years ago, at the Lido, the same question was asked about Gianfranco Rosi's film Notturno, another work that presents war zones (again in the Middle East) in an aestheticising manner.

Within Lorusso's film, the aesthetic dimension, as already mentioned, does not only have a decorative function but also visually translates some of the themes, some of the instances that the film takes up: the chiaroscuro, the cuts of light in the shots are also and above all used to emphasise the sense of unease, to highlight the sense of claustrophobia experienced by the characters, to amplify the precarious and unlivable situation in which the people find themselves inside the former hospital.

Although the debate on the ethicality of the film is open, and certainly each viewer will be able to form his or her own opinion on the matter, A Man Fell shows the living conditions of the Palestinian population, resorting to the cinematographic image and the hybridisation of documentary and fiction - even going so far as to challenge the limits of what can be filmed and presented visually - to present the audience with a reality of misery that is often not told. A film, therefore, that forces us to see beyond television and social images to fully understand the reality of the ongoing tragedy.

To Man Fell, the review: a documentary to testify to the resistance of the Palestinians

Giovanni C. Lorusso takes up the daily lives of Palestinian men, women and children inside the Gaza Building in Beirut. Presented in the Venetian Nights section of the Authors' Days.

Tell the suffering condition of the Palestinian people through the cinema. Last year the Authors' Days, the autonomous exhibition born within the Cinema Exhibition, did so with the splendid documentary Bye Bye Tiberias by director Lina Soualem. This year with another documentary, A Man Fell directed by Giovanni C. Lorusso is presented in the Venetian Nights section. A work, created under the patronage of Amnesty International Italy, that dialogues with the present and shows a portion of the world forgotten to itself. A little piece of Palestine in the heart of Sabra, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Beirut, in Lebanon.

A Man Fell: a burst of light in the dark

It is there that in 1982 the massacre of Sabra and Shatila carried out by the Lebanese Phalangi and the Israeli army took place, which led to the death of over three thousand civilians, mostly Palestinian citizens and Lebanese Shiites. And it is precisely there that the Gaza Hospital was born, a hospital of the Palestine Liberation Organization that ended up being dismantled and converted into a shelter. A Man Fell moves inside those dilapidated spaces. He does it through his young protagonist, the eleven-year-old Arafat, who spends his days playing with his best friend Muhammad among peeling walls, losses and waste. Meanwhile, in the building there is a rumor, perhaps true or false, of a man who fell from the palace for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Also director of photography, Giovanni C. Lorusso lets it be the spaces, the darkness and the glimmers of light to guide him in the direction by making the images look like the Caravaggesque paintings. The camera resumes stairs, corridors, apartments where its tenants move. A varied humanity that has found its own balance. A sort of city within the city - complete with underground where "there is only sex, drugs and death" - of which it captures everyday life.

An indirect claim of resistance

A documentary without a real plot as much as a testimony. An indirect claim of existence and resistance. To keep the different filmed realities between them, the story that echoes from apartment to apartment on the fall of a stranger. It is this faceless man the novelty that is being chased at the Gaza Building and whose truthfulness will only be given to know at the end, when the night has passed and the surrounding mosques will announce a new day.

Eleven floors that hold stories, desires, pain, laughter. A Man Fell shows a split of the Palestinian situation in Lebanon that becomes even more powerful in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Among the many moments captured by the camera also that of a group of women and children intent on arranging seedlings in repaired pots. A seemingly insignificant scene and, instead, very powerful. Because despite everything, despite the darkness and desolation, even in a place like the Gaza Building there is life, color.

Conclusions

In a historical moment characterised by the tragic images that arrive every day from Gaza, A Man Fell is an important testimony of the existence and resistance of the Palestinian people. The choice to concentrate in a circumscribed place such as the Gaza Building allows the director to film a daily life that has formed a microcosm. A reality unknown to most where, even in the darkness that surrounds the building, you can insinuate the light.

Giovanni Lorusso, in the Gaza Building without exit

Like the hospitals constantly bombed in Gaza and the West Bank in this last year of war, the Gaza Building of Sabra in Lebanon - since the late 1970s an ischeletrite palace that serves as a shelter for generations of Palestinian refugees without citizenship or access to health and education - was also a hospital. One of the best hospitals in the Middle East, with excellent doctors and patients from all over the world. A hospital of the Palestine Liberation Organization; then dismantled following the destruction produced by the war.

Now - the look close to that of an eleven-year-old named Arafat and some peers - A Man Fell by Giovanni C. Lorusso, in Venice 81 to the Authors' Days, postpones visions from the Gaza Building, with its eleven floors of darkness, devoid of natural light until the fifth: between puddles and silhouettes in the middle of the ruins, cloths washed in a bucket, drawings on the wall with markers that do not color, songs from the mosques in an ever-present, accessible elsewhere... So much so that the only escape way seems to be to throw yourself off the palace. A man fell, says the title, but is it true? It is repeated several times with a theatrical trend, forcibly claustrophobic, yet illuminated by flashes of poetry: little girls dancing among the shards and a flock of birds hovering "in the head" of a man who has lost three cards.

M.G. All this with the raids of Arafat that could refer to those of Antoine Doinel of Truffaut: only that here there are no possible adventures if not in the bituminous and humid dungeons where life is reset. Is this how the bombed hospitals in Gaza will become? Is it a pre-recognition of the future?
After approaching the mourning of a family of Shatila with Songs of All Ends (with Sabra, places of the Lebanese-Israeli made, committed in refugee camps in September '82), Lorusso, thanks to the support of Yasser Kamal Al Ali, seeks glims of humanity among the extreme shadows of Palestinian resistance.

M.G. I invite you to share a little chronicle of your relationship with those places, of what motivated you the most in making the two films you shot there.

My research is intertwined with my world travels: Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa... Four years ago I ended up in the Middle East, in Lebanon, one of the few places not prohibited during the pandemic. I made many acquaintances there. Obviously I always have to see things in a practical way because everything I do is self-produced and Lebanon was accessible. I then worked elsewhere, in South Africa and Gambia, but my heart had stayed there, and in 2022 with a family of Shatila, met two years earlier, I directed Songs of All Ends. In 2023 I returned to the same refugee camp, but the conditions had worsened. Then, taken by despair, I went to cut my hair and so I met Yasser, who then became co-producer of the film: he suggested that I visit the former Gaza Hospital, where he had lived. This is how my journey into the palace began.

I also want to say that I made these two films before October 7, 2023. Although I follow world politics, the intent was to represent a specific human condition at a specific historical moment through extreme social conditions.

M.G. What did the idea of bringing a camera there mean from a human and directorial point of view?

It's part of my philosophical research: when we visit places that challenge us, the most common reaction is to find them miserable, repulsive. Instead in my twenty-five years of travel I have discovered that with patience, attention, meditation you can make those places part of your existence. At first you feel sad for these people and you feel the desire to help them, but this propensity for me can be a huge limit, because you have to go beyond. So I try to ensure that the viewer can open up to this attitude, until he/she welcomes this vision with his/her heart.

That said, my first meeting with the Gaza Building was a nightmare. It was eleven o'clock in the evening, everyone was asleep and the darkness was absolute. From the outside the building is really scary. That night I said to myself 'how did I ended up here?... Then, starting as always to get to know and make myself known, sleeping in those spaces, waking up with the inhabitants, having breakfast together, going to the market to do the shopping, I immersed myself in that dimension on the border between survival and normality.

The same had happened with Shatila's family for Song of All Ends: with my wife and my son, then two years old, we stayed whole days playing with the children at the field. What I felt was, you gave me space to join your family, now let's make sure you can join mine.

M.G. What reactions did you encounter?
At first it was very difficult because - rightly so - they have to be protective: they suffered abuses several times by television crews from other countries, they entered without permission, they filmed, they left five dollars. That's why many told Yasser: we don't want to deal with the camera anymore.

So I spent a lot of time with the locals, living there, eating in different apartments and never arriving with the camera. In some spaces, if there were women, according to Islamic rules, I was not allowed to enter. Slowly they opened. Sometimes I decided not to use the material taken, other times I was asked to resume and I refused. I had boundaries given by the ethical principles that I formed over time, working in numerous productions and seeing many violations.

In addition, I always make a projection of the rough cut (non-definitive editing, ed), to the people involved and together we discuss it, they tell me what they would like to hear about their company and, even if they are often not in the cinematographic language, we find metaphorical forms to express things. At the Gaza Building there was also a significant episode: I was given back a lamp that I had used for the only scene with unnatural light and then forgot. They told me that nothing is ever returned. Instead, one of the people who most make their voice heard in there asked: give the lamp back to the cameraman because he is doing a respectful job. That was an essential moment for me: I had no money, I was not part of an embassy, I was nobody, but perhaps because of these reasons I was never seen as a threat.

M.G. The film has a distinctly theatrical dimension. We know that there is theater even in the minimum degree of action and in non-action, which is not only that perceived in the palace but, I think, it can also be that of the international community. The forced place unit of the film is a unit of rare lights and shadows. So, thinking about the myth of Plato's cave, I ask you if maybe we are the ones who are outside to be shadows...
The idea of shadows comes from a more pragmatic and at the same time spiritual suggestion. First of all, the need to find an angle. After the filming of the elderly woman with her son, I was desperate, I couldn't fall in love with the image. Instead, taking over the girls who laugh, smoke and listen to music - no longer with the tripod but with the hand chamber - I felt that feeling. And they were in the shade. Because at the Gaza Hospital the shadows swallow everything, and the light disappears between the walls, leaving no reflections if in rare appearances of brightness.

I almost always work making sure that the first take goes well, because otherwise you lose the essential magic of the natural. So I realised that I had to embrace that darkness, play with the shadows and position myself against the windows - the only gash towards an outside world from which the inhabitants are excluded. From that position, I realised that the shadows increasingly emphasised the status of imprisonment of the characters and this guided me throughout. The windows are the only antithesis to the most complete darkness and at the same time represent an impassable dividing line from the outside - which I decided never to show clearly, precisely to emphasise this feeling of an unattainable screen. The fact that they cannot live outside the building is greatly reflected in the experience of young people and in the abuse of drugs, which I tell you about in the documentary I am shooting. As for Plato, I hadn't thought about it, but now it's going to start spinning in my head.

M.G. In "The 400 Shots" the child protagonist faced the harshness of life. Here it is instead about the very impossibility of existence. Yet there is laughter, little girls growing plants, an irreducible poem.
I derived this approach from Kiarostami. But also from the reading of Ghassan Kanafani, the most important Palestinian writer in modern Palestinian literature. Died at 36, killed by Israel. His collection of short stories, Palestinian Children, delves into tragic moments of the war of '67. Unfortunately, even children can't deflect the horrible moment of checkpoints, but already a moment later there is something different in their heads. And this is the last hope we have left, isn't it? At the moment there is no possibility of changing this state of affairs, but it is in potential in these children, in Arafat who says, tomorrow we are going out of here. With Yasser we had this lightness in mind throughout the film, a lightness even in words, which was essential not to fall into rhetorical or cynical and to make the atmosphere breathe.

M.G. And the scene of the little girls growing the plants?
It was Yasser's idea. For some time he had been trying to bring plants to try to improve the appearance of the place, but every night they were stolen. So, I told him, it's time: if there are really gym classes held by his daughter why couldn't there be a class of children growing flowers? So we went in search of soil and pots. All these things are created day by day with nothing written, pre-ordered. Even the story of the three-card man came out of something I had witnessed, from the vision of a man who had suddenly entered a very tidy apartment and started rummaging everywhere to look for three lost cards. I realized that next to the absolute drama of the man who falls from the fourth floor as the only form of escape, there was also the ridical drama of that man. And that both are essential in different ways.

M.G. The words that one of the children who tells the killing of his father  are strongly touching, he expresses himself towards the responsibilities of the UN, the embassies...
I had spent some time in the dungeons and it was something I didn't want to repeat because I perceived it as too poignant: the people there live between humidity and darkness without electricity and without anything. I met a child and I wanted to go out with him but because of problems with the drug addict father nothing was done about it.

Then Yasser suggested Ibrahim, a friend of Arafat's best friend. Ibrahim is eleven years old and lives sadly dealing hard drugs in front of the building. I asked to talk to his father, he told me he was no longer there and we agreed to do a scene in which he spoke freely for two minutes. I asked Yasser not to translate what he said except at the end in order to leave everything more spontaneous. When I then learned what he had said, hearing a little boy talk so openly about his father's death by murder, it shocked me and I decided to keep that part in full.

M.G. Finally... compared to the title of the film, linked to a true story that you discovered as soon as you arrived at the Gaza Building. A story that, always theatrically, is questioned several times, as if it were fake news. I was wondering: if in the Italian translation instead of "Un uomo é caduto", we used the expression "L'uomo é caduto" - as they once said, in a certainly non-feminist way, to understand the human being - could we speak of an anthropological fall of humanity?
It's a very nice read but I tend to be more positive. Despite reading that there are currently 56 conflicts in the world, the highest number since the Second World War. I don't think there is a fall of the human race. I think we are in a phase where we really have the last resort: education, which is not information, but something much higher. I try first of all to educate myself and to give the possibility to those who want to get out of Western mental patterns, to open their hearts to another acquaintance. The title always comes from the concept of imprisonment. During the filming there were many stories about the man who fell from the palace: his fall, in a pragmatic and symbolic way, represented the last possible act to get out of that place. Actually then I learned that he only broke his leg, he didn't die... I believe that, despite everything, for our children we have the responsibility of hope.

VENICE 81 - "A Man Fell" live and die in the Gaza Building

Sabra, in Lebanon, is known for the massacre carried out in 1982 by the Lebanese phalanges and the Israeli army in order to kill Palestinian citizens and Lebanese Shiites, leaving over 3,000 victims. "A Man Fell" by Giovanni C. Lorusso takes place inside the Gaza Building, here stands the Gaza Hospital, which after being a hospital of the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine, was then dismantled at the end of the seventies, becoming a symbol of the survival of the Palestinians, who still find refuge there.

The protagonist Arafat Yasser Al Ali lives in the eleven abandoned floors of this building, together with his friend Muhammad Ramzi Zayed. Life is slow and boring, the building almost doesn't exist anymore, children play through the rubble and the gutted windows of the building, in which ghosts of men and women that the war has reduced to shadows in a real hell roam.

The camera of Giovanni C. Lorusso almost always remains fixed, observing the sounds and movements of these devastated interiors, with great attention to the care of the lights and shadows, the close-ups and gestures of those who live in the building. We follow the daily, the time of these people, everyone talks about a man who threw himself from the building, but maybe it's just a rumor, a story invented by some inhabitant of that place forgotten by the world. A man desperately searches for his three cards of the deck that he lost in the middle of the rubble, the children invent games and pastimes because there is not even an object, a wall that remains standing. The main location of the film, the ghostly Gaza Building becomes the main character of the story, with the peeling walls and the rooms illuminated only by glass-free windows.

"A Men Fell" is a beautiful film about the passage of time and the denied childhood in war zones. A flock of birds, in a very poetic scene, finally hovers in the sky with a piece of classical music, but in the end it's just a dream of a man locked in one of the rooms of the bombed building. The narrative line of the film is well dosed, between reality and staging. Who is really the mysterious man who flies from the palace? Is there really a morgue in the basement that the kids want to reach or is it yet another game for those children? Really interesting proof of direction by Giovanni C. Lorusso who was born in Sassari in 1981. He has a university education in literature in Rome, philosophy in London and in film directing at the Sydney Film School.

'A man fell': at Venice Days the doc sponsored by Amnesty International

The film tells the daily life in the "Gaza Hospital" known as the "Gaza Building": hospital in the late seventies and now a place of refuge and survival for generations of displaced people and Palestinian refugees

The film tells the daily life in the "Gaza Hospital" known as "Gaza Building": a hospital in the late seventies and now a place of refuge and survival for generations of displaced people and Palestinian refugees. Here lives the protagonist of the film, eleven-year-old Arafat, who spends time among the ruins of the eleven floors of the building together with his friend Muhammad, thinking about how to explore the forbidden dungeons, find something to do, survive.

The building is in Sabra, Lebanon, known because of the 1982 massacre, a place where past and recent events tragically overlap until today's drama.

The film received the patronage of Amnesty International Italy with these reasons:
"Sabra is a tragically important place for those who deal with human rights: associated with that of Shatila, it recalls the fierce and unpunished massacre of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children that took place in 1982. In an abandoned building in Sabra, three, if not four generations of Palestinians live left to themselves, between mute memories that tighten between the eyes of the elderly and a present of hardship, ingenuity to survive and little hope for the future. In these times of unprecedented massacres of the Palestinian population, History calls to remember, who wants, that that palace of Sabra would have had a very different destination without the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during and after the birth of Israel and following the occupation of 1967.”

"I always start from places that have a certain interest - says the director - without the precise idea of a subject, I build it around the first weeks of experience on site. In this case it all started with the meeting with a Palestinian barber, with whom I made friends. We are from the same generation, we like grunge and Pink Floyd, I immediately found myself at ease. Then he told me: come and see where I live. And so I had access to the Gaza Building, which I only knew as a ghostly image, a concrete skeleton, which scared me. He knew everyone on the various floors, so I started talking to people, and only after ten days I started filming, which lasted about fourteen. I slept a little there and a little in an apartment I had rented. I'm mainly looking for immediacy, so roughly speaking, if you exclude the various takes, I shot exactly everything you see in the film, as if it were an animated film. I want to represent what I and my collaborators feel at that precise moment".

The film starts with a man who falls from the building: "Yes, it happened after a few days that I was there. I heard some screams, but I didn't pay too much attention. Screaming is quite common in those parts. But after a few minutes the videos arrived, each with its own angle, and everyone had their own opinion or theory about what happened. It was like having a tabloid at hand. In the movie I tell big dramas and small stories, like that of a man who has lost some cards.

But the principle is always the lack of hope and the misery in which these people are forced to live. I know what happened to that man but I don't care, I was more interested in the reactions of the roommates, the hatred they expressed towards this person, also in a desperate condition".

Working as an anthropologist, Lorusso had to be accepted by the community: "The point in my favor - he says - is that I always go alone. I'm vulnerable, this helps me accept because I didn't live as a risk, a group or an abstract entity. People don't want to feel exploited, like when local televisions build services on misery in exchange for some change. There are two episodes that made me realize that I was on the right track. The first: I didn't want to talk about drugs, but then a man who smoked crack asked to participate, because he understood that I was telling the truth. The second: I had forgotten some lights and they were stolen from me. After a few days, the boss of the building gave them back to me: my work for them was worthy of respect. I had the same impression when I did a rough projection at Sabra: the community felt respected and unexploited, and this is the most important point of my work".