Why (1982, Monica Maurer)

Activist filmmaker Monica Maurer (1942, Munich) moved to Beirut in 1977 to work with the PLO’s Palestine Cinema Institute and over the course of five years, made six 16mm documentaries about and with the Palestinian resistance. After a successful collaboration in The Fifth War (1979) and Palestine Red Crescent (1980), filmmaker Maurer teamed up once again with Iraqi filmmaker Samir Nimr to make Why?. Shot in Beirut and released during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the film both portrayed the brutality of the siege and the indiscriminate attacks as well as people’s survival. The film is rhythmed by the urgency of sirens, communicating the human toll of the violence to a wider world in an attempt to rally support for the Palestinian revolution. Simultaneously, the film is loaded with the specter of an unclear future, the seeds of a massacre that was yet to come.