All is Well on the Border

Summary

One of Zaatari’s earliest experiments in documentary video, All Is Well on the Border emerged from the filmmaker’s desire to understand Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon following the 1982 Lebanon War. The video presents a series of testimonies by Lebanese citizens who were detained during the occupation, each presenting an image of resistance that falls outside the dominant narrative of liberation and solidarity promoted by the Lebanese left. At the same time, by actively resisting the tendency in political documentary filmmaking to give a voice to those who do not have one, Zaatari adopts a form of self-critique similar to the one used by Godard and Miéville twenty years earlier in Here and Elsewhere.