Several interconnected scenes make up “Chronicles from the Siege,” Abdallah al-Khatib’s harrowing, harrowing, and sometimes darkly hilarious dispatches from the front lines of violent air raids. The drama is shot from the perspective of a documentarian and takes place in the ruins of an unnamed city, but its setting is anything but vague. Especially since there are some Palestinian flags. The story is drawn from a variety of sources, including recent stories in Gaza and Al-Khatib’s own experiences under shelling in Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians in Damascus during the Syrian civil war. Al-Khatib, a Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker, previously made the documentary Little Palestine.
Shot in Algeria and Jordan, Al-Khatib’s sequel (and first dramatic feature) raises interesting questions about the usefulness of cinema during the genocide, both through its form and content. Is it really helpful? If Chronicles from the Siege is anything to go by, it’s that at least the camera has the ability to rehumanize people who have been constantly degraded and killed by showing them outside the immediate boundaries of their suffering and giving them mundane problems to overcome, even if they’re under extraordinary pressures that distort their sense of the everyday.
The situation is already dire when the story begins. In the film’s opening footage, a handheld video camera captures a crowd of displaced Arabs, young and old, gathered in a dilapidated town square, scrambling for the meager food thrown from the backs of trucks. Al-Khatib and cinematographer Talal Khoury quickly break away from this diegetic handycam (with which the film’s lens shares some aesthetic qualities and imbues it with an urgent realism), offering us glimpses of cinematic veracity at several characters who will be pushed to breaking point over the next 90 minutes.
The execution time appears to be several days, but it’s hard to be sure. As bombs continue to fall overhead, time seems to collapse on its own, and attempting to visit a neighbor becomes a matter of life and death under a hail of sniper bullets. Even the wall clocks seen throughout the film, which are glimpsed over the shoulders of the characters expressing the spiritual rifts of this siege, and where we encounter poems about the various Nakba, all appear to have stopped at around 7:30, regardless of the time. As time has progressed, the situation has not changed for Palestine and its displaced people.
This flattening of time also ensures that each section flows seamlessly into the next. We meet the lovable Arafat (Nadeem Rimawi), a troubled and hungry former video store owner, scavenging for food and medicine in near-silent scenes that set the stage for the film’s visual approach. The lighting is low, dim, and visually noisy, as if some rudimentary digital camera had been dropped on a battlefield and picked up by civilians. Still, these introductory scenes remain very cinematic, given Al-Khatib’s focus on the actors’ eyes and the different ways they work through despair. It doesn’t take long before digital static comes to embody the psychological fog that comes with living on a knife’s edge.
President Arafat’s story fits perfectly with that of a group of young friends, played by Samer Bisharat, Ahmad Kontar, Ahmad Jitouni, and Sajja Qilani, who temporarily take shelter in a boarded-up shop while searching for firewood, leading to more dialogue-heavy sequences that break up the gruffness you’ve come to expect from Palestinian films these days. The quartet’s goal is to survive, but while they look at the many tapes and posters on the store’s walls and exchange universally relatable jabs about pornography and masturbation, they end up facing a unique ethical dilemma. It’s a question of whether or not to add fuel to the fire for the sake of warmth. Emotion and realism collide in Al-Khatib’s desperate reflection on whether cinema, including the films we watch, can have a material impact on survival.
In keeping with this theme of tenacity, we next meet Walid (Wasim Fedrice), a meek bespectacled man. He attempts to trade an old refrigerator for a pack of cigarettes from the cunning smuggler Saleh (Idil Benabouche), revealing an entire hustle culture born of hunger and desperation. It’s a shorter, snappier episode, but Alkhatib implicates himself even more by playing an obnoxious thief who tricks people, but who you can’t help but empathize with.
Throughout the film, we hear the resistance network helping and warning each other over walkie-talkies, but when we finally meet one of its members, the fierce, gun-toting Fares (Emad Azmi), we find ourselves not so much a story of action and resilience as a surprising sex comedy about premature ejaculation. Lest it seem too vulgar for such a serious backdrop, issues of transactional intimacy are also layered in for sustenance, as girlfriend Huda (Maria Zurek) sneaks through the artillery for a plan that appears to be dessert for sex, and is ultimately intense and surprisingly funny.
Although there are occasional moments of levity, “Siege Chronicles” remains firmly rooted in the dangers of its surroundings, even as even the hilarious comedy is frequently punctuated by the roar of bomb drops. All of this culminates in a stunning sequence set in a dilapidated hospital, where the majority of the ensemble returns and the race-against-time finale is filmed in a mesmerizing long take, forced into further moral dilemmas under the threat of oblivion. Learning about each character over the course of the film not only adds individual dimensions to each scenario (thus expanding the characters’ vision beyond their victimhood), but also deepens the overall social structure.
This climactic conflict is woven from several small ethical tug-of-wars between each character, who exhibit both selfishness and altruism in various scenes, ultimately bringing their complex humanity into the harsh spotlight. The result is a particularly moving thematic conclusion that sits quietly amidst the chaos. It’s an innate understanding that everyone deserves to live, no matter who they are or what they’ve done.
