Overview

With his hand-held video camera, Jalal Toufic presents faces of ordinary people living in a war-ravaged country. He begins with a 1987 US state department document invalidating US passports for travel to Lebanon. Then, we see walls marked by bullet holes, film students listening to a lecture and practicing scenes in a restaurant. Next, the camera visits a mental hospital in Fanar and an older man, holding his Koran, laments being a refugee within his own country. The camera then enters a nursery school. The colors of poetry are red and green; the cost of being Lebanese is to orphan one's children in order then to adopt them.