“Where Do We Go Now” – A Beautiful Film by Nadine Labeki

Guest blogger: Maraika Kuipers-Sharsher, graduate student, Migration Studies Program, University of San Francisco

The film “Where Do We Go Now” directed by Nadine Labeki, is a beautifully done, inspirational piece about Lebanon during the height of the civil war, featuring a small village in the mountains outside Beirut that chose peace over war, life over death.  This is a heart wrenching tail of Christians and Muslims living together with violence all around them, centering in on the stories of the village’s courageous women who work together to keep the peace between the men, with each family having already lost someone to the bloody war.  The movie opens with a graveyard, the graves divided by religion, pictures of young men lay on top of the tombstones, frozen in the frames, revered as martyrs to the struggle, but remembered as lost sons, fathers, and husbands to their families left behind.  This sets the stage for not only the suffering that has been endured by people of this village, but an inevitable foreshadowing of future events, war is ugly, war destroys homelands and separates families, but as seen in the resilience of the women, war did not crush their spirits.  There are many important themes in this film that prove interesting for not only viewers at home, but also for academic audiences.  We see the dynamics of religion, violence, and ways that women undermine the patriarchy by circumventing the traditional rules, ultimately saving their families from falling victim to sectarian violence.  When the village’s first TV set is brought up from the city, they start to hear news about the war between Christians and Muslims, during the first few minutes of the news conference, the women start to fight amongst themselves and their families, creating a distraction so that the men of their lives don’t take it upon themselves to bring the war home.  This is just one of many strategies utilized by the women, the next being through their religion.  They bring the mayor’s wife into the church late at night and have her miraculously talking with the Virgin Mary, prophesizing of piles of weapons and spilled blood, which sparked fear into the villagers. 

With a miracle in the works, the women seem to be confident that this will quell the tension, but when a local boy comes back into the village from the main city dead, the mother of the fallen child knows she cannot tell anyone, for this will spark civil war for sure.  We feel her pain as she washes her son in the tub and puts him in the well outside her home for protection against the heat and dust that covers the earth.  She then runs to the church where she laments to a statue of the Virgin Mary, weeping begging her to return her son.  Upon hearing no response, the woman gets angry and vows never to return to church again.  In this scene we see a glimpse of what makes people lose their faith, especially for Arabs who have been victimized by colonizers, settlers, and their imperialist owned governments, who have been doomed to wear black, forever mourning their lost land, loved ones, and dignity. After two days, the women of the village realize their friend is acting strange, they then find out about her son’s death.  Now comes the impossible task, they cannot keep her son in the well, he must be buried so his soul can move onto the afterlife.  When the men of their families wake up the next morning, the women have converted to the other religion of the village, the Muslims become Christians and the Christians become Muslims. Now if their sons wanted to kill each other, their mothers were now the enemy making it impossible to fight.  This film presented a ray of hope in the dark days of war that has destroyed countries and displaced

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