Story of Fatat

Director: Ibrahim Harb
Duration: 23m
Country: Lebanon
Year: 2016

Fatat spends her days and nights caring for her bed-confined husband. Then he dies, and she must struggle for her and her son's survival. After living for a while in extreme poverty and deprived of any help from her family, she decides to leave Lebanon for Europe. The story of Fatat is just as much the story of the terrible war, which takes place exclusively offscreen. Thus the extreme narrow shots in which we see Fatat after her husband’s death serve not only as a means to express her suffocating despair, they also draw attention to the horrors of war happening around her, which we can not see but only hear. As the shots get wider, we see the protagonist and her son embarking on a boat with the destination Europe, in a last attempt to escape a disastruous situation and find happiness against all odds.