Under the Bombs (2007)

It is not possible for human beings to show same emotions on all occasions.In life there are moments when drama becomes comedy.This is exactly what happens in French film "Sous Les Bombes" /Under the bombs. This is a comedy based on richness of human experiences during times of war when people try not to lose their heads over small matters.This is a film which has adopted a convenient road movie format to communicate its message of peace and harmony.It is precisely due to this format that this film's two main characters are able to unwind and reveal their true nature.Director Philippe Aractingi has decided to get his film made during actual times of war.This gives a lot of authenticity to this film. It is due to such a tough yet necessary decision that we get to comprehend atrocities of war.Actors Elham Abbas and Iman Affara play their leading roles with great conviction.To conclude, we can state that "Sous Les Bombes" is a good film but it has its fair share of TV film aesthetics. This is the only drawback of this film.

. . . exactly how UNDER THE BOMBS is a fair and balanced film that has a right to be exhibited in United States movie theaters, as opposed to pure hate speech propaganda from the folks who brought us 9-11, akin to the Neo-Nazi hate speech universally banned by all proper-thinking civilized countries. The one funeral scene shown in UNDER THE BOMBS actually is an anti-American hate rally, complete with chants of "Death to American, death to the Great Satan." It has been widely publicized by the world's most respected news organizations, such as 60 MINUTES, that 83% of the curriculum the alleged children victims being depicted in UNDER THE BOMBS consists of instilling a life-long hatred of Jews and Americans, which occasionally manifests itself in the form of kids younger than the dead ones in this movie (HOW they actually died--for instance, an anti-aircraft round falling short and hitting an ammo dump in a school gymnasium, one of the most likely possibilities TOTALLY IGNORED by director Philippe Aractingi) fatally ambushing peacekeepers on the border. Aractingi spends his entire film trying to make people such as Vanessa Redgrave feel sorry for what folks living in the Dark Ages apparently are inviting upon themselves in the most desperate ways (fueled by one of the world's highest birthrates, to support Pyrrhic "victories" based on tactics similar to those used by army ants). Unfortunately, a significant number of Oscar Awards voters and Hollywood fifth columnists insist on dragging Trojan horses such as UNDER THE BOMBS within the walls of Fortress America.

It is not possible for human beings to show same emotions on all occasions.In life there are moments when drama becomes comedy.This is exactly what happens in French film "Sous Les Bombes" /Under the bombs. This is a comedy based on richness of human experiences during times of war when people try not to lose their heads over small matters.This is a film which has adopted a convenient road movie format to communicate its message of peace and harmony.It is precisely due to this format that this film's two main characters are able to unwind and reveal their true nature.Director Philippe Aractingi has decided to get his film made during actual times of war.This gives a lot of authenticity to this film. It is due to such a tough yet necessary decision that we get to comprehend atrocities of war.Actors Elham Abbas and Iman Affara play their leading roles with great conviction.To conclude, we can state that "Sous Les Bombes" is a good film but it has its fair share of TV film aesthetics. This is the only drawback of this film.

Director Aractingi shot this film in the immediate wake of the systematic 34-day Israeli bombing of Lebanon in summer 2006, which left much of the country devastated, especially the South. He uses his own footage of the bombing itself, which shows whole neighborhoods being decimated, and then shoots among the rubble to tell the story of Zaina (Nada Abou Farhat), a divorced mother who comes from Dubai, where she was living with her architect husband, to find Karim, her six-year-old son, who was trapped by the bombing in Kherbet Salam, a Shia Muslim village in southern Lebanon. Zaina left Karim there with her sister, ironically, to "protect" him from the stress of her divorce. The only taxi driver who'll make the dangerous trip is Tony (George Khabbaz), a Christian who turns out to be from the South himself.Aractingi got the idea of shooting in war devastation with an improvised plot in 1989 as Lebanon's civil war of that time wound down, but fear prevented him from proceeding. Instead he shot 40 documentaries and one feature that used improvisation (the 2005 Bosta) and also starred Nada Abou Farhat. As he got to work with his cast and crew for Under the Bombs, beginning shooting during the bombing and continuing during the ceasefire, he made the decision not to deal with the war so much as its impact on innocent victims, which Zaina and Karim obviously are.And many of the people and their sufferings are authentic and real-time. When Tony and Zaina reach Kherbet Salam the building her sister lived in is completely destroyed. A young woman comes up and tells her Maha, her sister, is a martyr now. Zaina and Tony go to witness the disinterring of those who died to be reburied in "martyrs' graves," hoping to find the body of Maha (they do not). Aractingi films the actual funerals--not an easy task.People say Karim was taken up by foreign journalists and went away with them, and this leads Tony and Zaina further south, just a few kilometers from the Israeli border, where they stop over with Tony's Christian family. It emerges that they were collaborators during the long Israeli occupation of south Lebanon and one brother is among those who fled to live in Israel in the aftermath of that time. The confrontation between Tony and his relatives over this collaboration is the fruit of discussions among villagers which Aractingi and his co-writer, Michel Léviant, condensed into a script. This is one example of how the actual fed into the fictional in the day-to-day shooting.The emotions are powerful and the backgrounds are horrifying in the film. Nothing quite equals the sense of identification when Zaina looks at a whole street where her sister lived and finds only ruins after the systematic bombing destruction. Less successful at times are the interactions between Zaina and Tony, who flirts, comforts, and acts out a surprisingly graphic sex scene with a room clerk at a hotel they stop at on the way. Khabbaz and Abou Farhat are good, but some cutting might have helped eliminate distracting elements. The car's breaking down just before the couple gets to the monastery where Karim is rumored to be seems a rather obvious suspense device too.The film is neutral as it can be, perhaps to a fault. One wonders why Hezbollah is barely even mentioned, since it is the other party in the warfare, and was the prime provider of aid to the victims in the bombing's immediate aftermath. Though the collaborating family members refer to being "forced to work for the Devil," meaning Israel, the focus is on the suffering rather than its source. Aractingi's film has flaws, but its boldness in bringing to the screen the 2006 bombing of Lebanon and the civilian suffering it caused can't be faulted.The San Francisco International Film Festival 2008 provided the West Coast premiere of this film, which was scheduled to open less than two weeks later, on May 12, in Paris. This was nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance and received the EIUC Award at Venice.