Nightfall

In 1975, a group of Lebanese students called the “Student Squad” joined the Palestinian resistance movement, Fatah. The group dispersed in 1982, after the Israeli invasion. 25 years later, Mohamad Soueid looks back at this period and meets some of his former comrades who have survived and not left the country. With twenty years of hindsight, the filmmaker collects open and spontaneous testimonies about commitment and its meaning. Memories and solitude are shared through nights overflowing with drunkenness, laughter, food, melancholy, poetry and song. This funny and touching scene, showing one of the protagonists stumbling on the stairs, sound tracked by the revolutionary anthem, also marks the contrast between reality and idealism. They drink to forget, but also to remember. And we, as the audience, are invited to these unique moments of reunion, these opportunities to remake and unmake the world as night falls. If Robert Frank had been Lebanese, Indama Ya’ati al-Masa could perhaps have been the Pull My Daisy of the Middle East.

Jasmin Basic