[…] Part meditation on grief; partly a stark, stripped-down look at the marginalised refugee population of Lebanon, and part a memento mori of a place and a life on the verge of extinction, Song of All Ends is a defiant record of a people who choose to persist, to carry on, against all colossal odds. It also happens to be one of the most visually striking documents of Arab life ever put on screen. Music emerges as the sole reverie for this family, be it the classical Arabic music recited by the father, which represents a relic from a lost and kinder past, or in the contemporary Egyptian popular music that stands as the solitary means for mindless escapism. Lorusso shoots his subjects in moody monochrome, transposing their unspoken pain and brokenness into a series of still frames laced with an aching beauty. The effect bears a close resemblance to the films of Portuguese director Pedro Costa who employed a similar aesthetic in recording the immigrant residents of the Fontainhas slums. Costa has been criticised on occasion for aestheticising poverty: prettifying an otherwise stark reality. What Costa and by default Lorusso have done, however, is grant these invisible characters an iconography that is unattainable in real life, treating them with the kind of dignity and reverence they have long been denied.

'Song of All Ends': Lorusso's photographic masterpiece in the Palestinian refugee camp

Song of All Ends is a film by Giovanni C. Lorusso. The director is also its screenwriter, director of photography and editor (here with Silvia Arecco). Produced by LaboGCL, it premiered at IFFR and most recently at FESCAAAL in the EXTR'A competition. Among the performers: Galeb Alhaddad, Bouthina Alhaddad, Abdullah Alhaddad, Shrouk Alhaddad, Hassan Alhaddad, Ali Solaiman, Houda Alhaddad.

This project grew out of a two-year close collaboration with the community of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian residents in Shatila Camp, focusing in particular on the Alhaddad family. Previously, Lorusso worked with the same family to create the self-published 2021 book 'The Limits of the Rupture', documenting the days and weeks following the Beirut explosion in August 2020. Song of All Ends Synopsis The film chronicles daily life in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila after the tragic explosion in the port of Beirut. Sharing a burden of deep sorrow with a family, we become inextricably linked to the singular experience of the struggle to return to life. In search of a new beginning, they must abandon all that is left.

A hieratic incipit Song of All Ends gently draws us into the everyday life of the Palestinian refugee camp. The atmosphere immediately takes shape through compelling, majestic images. It begins with a close-up shot of the elderly family member: he is smoking, his off-screen voice echoing in words that seem to come out of the Koran. Each verse carefully linked to the images we are shown in this prologue. Immediately the light is linked to little Houda.

"My eyes, do not cast away your astonished gaze towards the incandescent rays of life. Sleep, cover yourselves in deep darkness, my eyes. Do not suppress your habitual strength, for I will show you a brighter light. And through the night all will be clearer."

Photo-reportage shots of a child's face, a teddy bear, rags waving in the breeze, roofs submerged in rubble, tarpaulins, skeletal buildings, a barn. Life in all its everyday affairs passes before our eyes in dramatic, emotional black and white. This is not merely a choice for effect, as in many other films. Lorusso makes perpetual play between darkness and light, glimpses of the sky and the darkness of interior spaces; all sublimated by the few emblematic dialogues we witness.

There are numerous shots from above, with a strong perspective component with which the photography 'plays'. The cuts of light now caress, now weigh down the setting and the characters, as we see them busy with what life has left them. There is no obvious link, other than the everyday, between one scene and the next. Yet nothing seems superfluous.

"How are the children? Hasan, Abdullah, Shrouk? They are all fine. But there is no school, they are at home all day... at home doing nothing! Doing nothing most of the time. There is no school, so they stay at home and make trouble."

These are the words of the mother, whom we hear talking to someone. In moving scenes we see them playing war in the rubble, sometimes with cats, occasionally dancing and listening to music. Everyone, not just them, is captured in the stark contrast between solitude and group scenes: their anxieties, their joys, often their visions and even their dreams.

But at one point the colour returns.

"Do you know that your little sister is always watching us?" The little girl we see from the very beginning and who moves like a ghost among the places of the refugee camp is the youngest of the family. Houda died a victim of tragedy and there is not a day goes by when her parents and grandfather do not remember her with ever more piercing pain. They continue to see her and arrange her bedroom, waiting with hope for 'tomorrow' (the only word we hear her say, whispering like a spectre in the ear of the sleeping elder).

"Why did God keep everyone and take Houda away? So I said to God: It is over between you and me. I do not know you and you do not know me. And that is what happened. And to this day we are still on bad terms."

Halfway through the film, suddenly, the colour element returns: in the dream the mother and father look at their daughter, with intense shots of their eyes. Then awake again we see that colourless gaze. It will be because of a vision of the head of the family, guided by the little girl who is always watching them, that the group will finally move away, far away, into the snow, in search of hope. In the last scene around the fire, we see everyone, including Houda and her teddy bear, in the light of hope that accompanies them.

In this lyrical moment, the father recites A note for a traveller by Sargon Boulus:

'When I saw death performing its ablutions in the fountain, People around me crossing the streets in their sleep, It seemed that my dreams were pyramids of sand crumbling before my eyes, I saw my day fleeing in the opposite direction far away from that cursed city... We choose the beginning, But the end chooses us, And there is no road except the road."

It opens with an invitation to look at Song of All Ends, the documentary film by Giovanni C. Lorusso presented in the Gabbiano competition of the forty-second edition of the Bellaria Film Festival. This invitation, which urges our eyes to look beyond the darkness of the night (or of life), is encapsulated in the verses of Jean De Sponde. It is an old man who recites them, while the directorial movement alternates the close-up of his face with a fixed shot of the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. Inside, like a nucleus from which a fragmented light originates, the narrative focuses on the Alhaddad family and the everyday life of its members.

At the centre of the microcosm, however, is a body that shuns that same gaze, a vacancy that haunts the family environment.

Framed by the photographic use of black and white, Lorusso's images restore a progressive sense of respectful closeness, uniting the time of the visual narrative with the simple actions of the characters, in order to expand their meaning. What weighs most heavily, then, is not so much a political-didactic narrative on the Shatila camp as an aesthetic of pragmatism that leads back to a very specific event. It hovers over life in Shatila like a shadow, creating a sense of endless waiting that cannot be filled, but only resumed. Respectfully entrusted to the static nature of the photographic image which, contrasted with the movement of a certain cinema of reality, enhances the approach of the documentary narrative. The historical fact from which we start is the explosion of the port of Beirut in August 2020, a detonation that impregnates the fabric of the images and, as such, shatters them from within. Lorusso entrusts his photographs, taken in the field a few days after the explosion, with the task of narrating the event and its aftermath. The photographs combined with the editing work create a documentary-visual storytelling that, while leading back to concrete reality, become hazy and lose sharpness. Standing out in the middle of the photographic narrative, like a red thread destined to appear again and again, is none other than a teddy bear divided from its owner: Houda, the youngest of the Alhaddad family. The missing body. The ghost of death overbearingly bursts into Lorusso's tale, and yet remains outside of it, entrusted to the dream dimension that, made explicit by the nocturnal sequences, divides the family's days. It is no coincidence that the use of colour is inserted into the documentary in segments of sequences that become collective visions of the family microcosm. Visions that haunt the environment, creating only the illusion of a fullness that openly clashes with reality in the Shatila camp. The daytime dimension, which belongs instead to the realism of the documentary, shows another spectre hovering around the lives of the refugees in the camp. It is the war going on around, a real war that affects people's private lives and, becoming a performative element in the film, attaches itself to the Alhaddad family to denounce loss. It is entrusted to the almost mimic gestures of the young members of the family, which are performed as if in play. Testifying to this is the work on the soundtrack, which records the buzzing buzz of life in Beirut while remaining off-screen, like a danger away from the images.

Lorusso's directorial style in Song of All Ends delicately restores a mixture of the real and the imaginary, creating a cinematic 'metadata' that makes the documentary approach an archive for images. Thus containing - and protecting - a phantasmal memory belonging to another time, a crystallised and painful past that, in the very force of the photographic experience, can lead to the search for a new beginning. Another journey yet to be told.

[…] Giovanni C. Lorusso’s Song of All Ends, which tells the story of the Alhaddad family living in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, 16 months after the city’s deadly port explosion. Neither Shatila nor the family are new to crises. Along with the Sabra camp, Shatila witnessed one of the deadliest massacres in the Lebanese civil war in 1982, killing hundreds — possibly thousands — of civilians. Shot in black and white, Song of All Ends portrays the suspended life of a family attempting to heal after learning of their daughter’s death in the 2020 explosion. A slow-burn plot reveals how this trauma is reflected in the family’s everyday interactions, but also in the surrounding community. Filmed in the Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian residential communities of the Shatila Camp, the film’s grim yet elegant cinematography uses closeups footage to capture the residents’ bored and hopeless faces.

Song of all Ends had its national premiere at the Bellaria Film Festival. The film, directed by Giovanni C. Lorusso, stages a particularly interesting plot, and one that is never rendered banal: the dramatic convergence of historical time on the one hand and existential time, of a small family unit, on the other.

The use of black and white and the scarcity of dialogue in Song of all Ends traces the existence of a family that has suffered a serious bereavement: the death of their youngest daughter, named Houda. An event that occurred during the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020: the film's timeframe, in fact, can only begin "16 months after the explosion". The genesis of the story corresponds to a deflagration that is not, however, synonymous with the beginning, but with destruction. The similarity is only partially possible, and soon turns into antithesis through the protagonists' expression of vivid grief.

The viewer is plunged into a black-and-white, closed, immobile world. It is the Shatila refugee camp, where the Palestinian Alhaddad family has been living since 2011. Driven from their land, the children can no longer go to school because of economic problems, and the adults try in every way to survive the day.

There is no room for words - which in fact are revealed through sparse and meagre dialogue - because the images already tell and show everything. It is a present of pain, both for the mourning and for the family's condition of hardship and poverty. A claustrophobic microcosm from which escape seems impossible, at least up to a certain point. When, that is, the moment of maximum crisis, and at the same time of rupture, is reached. Another explosion, this time internal, seems to loom on the characters' horizon.

The camera captures their eyes, then their hands, focusing on their nails, and finally their gazes. No words: it is the eyes, hands and looks that convey the desperation and loneliness felt by all the family members, adults and children alike. Escape to freedom: the hope of a new life. Throughout the duration of Song of All Ends, the spectator breathes in the desperation and profound discomfort experienced by the protagonists, almost coming to the point of wanting something to change radically. The static reality immobilises any possibility of action on the part of the protagonists, who repeatedly live an existence devoid of any glimmer of serenity, committed only to survival.

Freedom is almost a liberating cry that remains stifled in those eyes, in those hands and in those glances captured by the camera, in an attempt to restore the authenticity and at the same time the dignity of human suffering.

A cry that at the end of the film is taken up by the protagonists: the family leaves, without knowing what the destination will be. And it is not at all important. It has reached the end of one of its personal journeys, that of grieving, and is now ready to face the next one: the reappropriation of life. There is hope, in the form of a new beginning.

"Cover yourself in the darkness: by the end of the night you will see more clearly”.

Watching Song of All Ends, one often has the impression of witnessing a simple photographer's trip, so much so that the sumptuous black and white images of the daily lives of his subjects evoke a World Press Photo exhibition (where we discover children fishing in the rubbish, couples dancing on the beaten earth, old people making eggs in cast-iron frying pans, the resilience, the waiting, the boredom provoked by the ruinous and transitory world that surrounds them). But there's more. There's the tragedy of the explosion itself, which is rendered in the form of a brief howl, thanks to a rapid montage of jerky images coupled with panicked voices. It has the effect of a cine-punch that hits you straight in the face. There's also the presence in the absence, that of a deceased young girl who we guess at the sight of an abandoned cuddly toy being fought over by kittens, then who appears to us as a ghostly, curious apparition, languidly wandering the premises until she reaches the bedside of her pious father, whose spirituality then finds a salutary meaning.

How much suffering can a person handle? There is no answer to that in Song Of All Ends, but as a viewer, you see plenty of it. Razor-sharp, beautifully shot black-and-white images take you into a grieving process of a family that is also on the run. It is understandable, that in such a process, you lose faith.

The utter devastation is still obvious. Is that ever going to get better, you ask yourself. Time will tell, but clearly the refugee camp is getting little to no attention. What does get attention is the loss of a family member. That teddy bear is painfully confrontational in this, as is the refugee camp. The documentary is observational anyway, with few words. In this case, images also say more than words. And what can you do in this case? Move on, as you have no other option. […]