Marwa Arsanios ( selection and introduction) ~ Mourning our Sons

This short program proposes three films dedicated to mourning the martyrs of South Lebanon through different invasions, wars, occupations, resistances and three different relations to image production and political filmmaking.  
Starting with Maroun Baghdadi’s "The Most Beautiful of all Mothers" from 1978 , that was produced by the Lebanese National Movement (a front of left-wing including the communist and socialist parties, pan-Arabist and Syrian nationalist parties and organisations which worked along the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and formed the main resistance front against Israel and their Lebanese right wing collaborators). Baghdadi portrays young resistance fighters mostly from the Communist Labor Organisation along mothers and family members of martyred fighters. The second film in the program "Merely a Smell" from 2007 by Maher Abi Samra captures the unrecognisable landscape of the south in the aftermath of the 2006 Israeli war and invasion. And finally "A Girl Gazing" from 2026 is a close portrait of funerals that shifts the lens and the temporality of war journalism. The helplessness of mourning is often defied through an immeasurable attachment to the land. This program attempts to recompose a landscape shaped by burial, resistance, and a continuous threat of annihilation, where mourning becomes also a mourning for land. 

About Marwa Arsanios 

Mourning our Sons will be presented on the 4th of October in the context of 

APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle