29 March 2019, 20:30, ICA Cinema

Film: A Feeling Greater Than Love [Shu'our Akbar Min el Hob], Mary Jirmanus Saba, Lebanon, 2017, DCP, 93 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles

Mary Jirmanus Saba’s first feature-length film is a poignant essayistic enquiry into the political activism of factory workers, especially women, in Lebanon before the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. The film focuses particularly on two major factory workers’ strikes – one in a chocolate factory, the other in a tobacco factory – investigating the memories that remain of these largely forgotten events and the people who fought for their dignity in the face of deep-rooted injustice and longstanding oppression. Through present-day interviews and discussions alongside archival footage, Jirmanus Saba constructs a lucid and informative conversation between past and present, questioning why this type of popular activism now seems to belong to a lost era. Drawing proudly on Lebanon’s militant filmmaking tradition, A Feeling Greater Than Love seeks to reconstruct the spirit of the workers’ revolts, looking to the past to enquire as to how we might transform the present.

This screening was followed by a discussion between director Mary Jirmanus Saba and filmmaker and researcher Alisa Lebow, University of Sussex.