I first encountered the work of Nadim Mishlawi in the basement of a Beirut bistro. It was April 2017, anda former student had invited me to a special screening of a documentary called Sector Zero. Its premise—a look at Beirut’s industrial, portside district of Karantina—intrigued me, but the film exceeded my expectations. Sector Zero is a dark and brooding meditation on the Lebanese condition, an examination of Karantina filtered through the lens of psychoanalysis and presented in the style of the horror genre. Mishlawi was present at the screening that night to take questions from the audience, and our discussion gradually turned into a friendship. In the years since, Beirut has gone through unbelievable turbulence—not just the COVID pandemic, but a catastrophic (and ongoing) economic collapse, a massive protest movement, chronic worsening electricity cuts, gas strikes, and pharmaceutical shortagesAnd if all of that was not already enough, on August 4, 2020, the city’s port blew up in one of the world’s largest non-nuclear explosions. In an instant, over 200 people were killed, tens of thousands were injured, and more than a quarter of a million were made homeless. Large parts of Beirut were completely decimated, including many of the streets and buildings that Mishlawi had explored in Sector Zero.
Throughout these tumultuous years, Mishlawi has been steadily at work, observing these overwhelming events while toiling away on a new film, After the End of the World. Like Sector Zero, this documentary also concentrates on Beirut, but rather than focusing on the dark, claustrophobic alleyways and hidden, unsettling spaces of Karantina, After the End of the World zooms out. Starting with his own father’s death, Mishlawi invites his viewers to contemplate a different Beirut and to focus on the city’s complicated architectures and confusing temporalities. I caught up with Mishlawi in May 2022, a month before the film was scheduled to have its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest where it has been selected as a contender in the International Competition. We met at his apartment in Sin El-Fil, a neighborhood located just beyond Beirut’s eastern city limits. With a view from his balcony onto the city’s skyline, he discussed his films and ideas.
Greg Burris (GB): How would you describe your two films to readers who have not yet seen them? Do you see these two films as completely separate works or as building upon each other? In other words, is After the End of the World a sequel to Sector Zero?
Nadim Mislawi (NM): I think that the two films correlate in that they are both about places—the individual and his or her relationship to space. But other than that, they are quite different. I think After the End of the World is a more contemplative film and also more of a reflection than an analysis. It is also very personal, using anecdotes and stories from my life as the skeleton around which the film is constructed. I don’t know how I would describe them. I would maybe say “meditative” and “stylized.” The stylization in both films was part of the process from the beginning. We didn’t want to make any compromises when it came to the image and sound of the films. The idea of stylization stems from the notion that despite our presuppositions, documentary films are very subjective. I wanted that to be felt by the audience in both films—that these stories are being told through the filter of my own experiences and perceptions.
Image from Sector Zero (2011)
GB: What was the overall response to your first film, Sector Zero? Did certain audiences appreciate it more than others?
NM: Sector Zero is not a very accessible film. I’m aware of that. And I think it resonated louder for some people more than others. I got a lot of positive responses, which led to the film winning a couple of awards, and I also know that others found it difficult in some way or another. My father was obviously very proud, but generally, I don’t think he really liked the film. I remember the most enthusiastic audience response was in Tunisia where the film was screened as part of a documentary festival. This was not long after the uprising there, and people were feeling very galvanized. The Q&A after the film was very energetic, and the comments and questions were very insightful. Some audience members discussed issues of identity and history in a way I hadn’t thought of previously, and they pushed me to think about my own film differently.
GB: You have now made two films about Beirut. Can you talk a bit about your interest in this city? What does Beirut mean to you, and why do you choose to continue focusing on it?
NM: I live and work here. I’ve lived most of my life here. So I guess just like anyone here, I’m naturally drawn to it, and I think the troubles, the turbulent history just asks to be spoken about, asks to be analyzed—not in the sense of research but in the sense of trying to reconcile a lot of these problems. I mean, if you’re coming from a place that’s so tormented and that place means a lot to you, automatically you start thinking what you can do to change the situation. That is to say, making films is almost a necessity for me more than anything else. I think if Beirut was a very stable city, I wouldn’t have much interest in it. There’s a lot going on, it’s very complex, very complicated, and that just makes it all the more interesting. I mean, you have to be careful here not to fetishize these types of things, and in my first film in particular, we were very careful not to do that. I actually feel something sad when I think of Karantina. That’s why we used it as the metaphor for the whole city and tried to show that there’s something interesting happening there. It’s not just a trash dump.
GB: Yes, it’s something of a cliché that people simultaneously love and hate Beirut.
NM: I think that we can say that about any place. I mean, we probably have the same relationship with the houses we were raised in. It’s a place where we had, maybe, both a loving family and some of our most traumatic experiences. So the love-hate thing doesn’t really work for me. It’s more about experiences and how they shape our perception. Some people run away from Beirut, some people feel comfortable leaving it, moving elsewhere, but I never felt I needed to do that.
GB:There are definitely certain neighborhoods that I can tell you are drawn to—obviously Karantina with Sector Zero, but also that nice scene you include in Basta in your more recent film. You get a real sense of the different textures of different parts of Beirut and the geography of the city.
NM: You use the word “texture” which is exactly what I’ve been trying to achieve with both films—physical texture and a kind of abstract sense of texture, as in memories and dreams. We went even further with this idea in After the End of the World by using more archives and still photography. Again, it’s about relaying an experience. I have no personal ties to Karantina. But it is nonetheless an area that thrills me and triggers certain emotions. Its history and people, but also the abandoned state it’s currently in. There is something very melancholic and at the same time haunted about Karantina. And the same can be said for Basta, a neighborhood of Beirutknown for its plethora of antique shops. It’s really inspiring walking through the streets and seeing the arcades filled with objects that shaped peoples’ lives. It is uncanny in the true sense of the world—unhomely. It’s both familiar and completely alien.
GB:When watching your latest film, I was kept thinking about the notion of Apocalypse. I mean, the name of your film is After the End of the World. These days, everybody seems to be thinking about the end of the world, but I feel like these ideas have really begun to dominate our everyday conversations here in Beirut. What’s your sense of it?
NM: It’s funny, I’ve recently become very interested in the nineteenth century, and specifically nineteenth-century Britain and the huge shift that came with the Industrial Revolution that really uprooted everything and completely changed the landscape. I’ve always liked John Martin, who is kind of known as the painter of the Apocalypse. His paintings are generally very dark but also very textured: strange cloud formations, detailed topographies. He was living at a time when ideas of the Apocalypse were being discussed all the time as a result of the changing landscape and the industrial spaces that were taking over. Life was becoming very polluted and grim. So it naturally came to him to think about the Apocalypse, about how his world was changing. So, After the End of the World is obviously not about the world ending. Rather, what I mean to say is that there is a world that is ending. So, the end of this world and the becoming of a new one. And that’s the idea of the film; the process of things ending doesn’t stop when the world has ended. They continue for a while. You live in the shadow of things ending for a very long time.
GB: If somebody watched this film today, they might think you had the Beirut port explosion in mind the entire time, but you actually started making it more than seven years ago. Can you talk a bit about that process?
NM: So I basically started with a desire to make a film about Beirut. It was that simple. In the beginning, some people thought, “Ok, well, that sounds very trite.” I remember watching [Martin] Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and thinking, if anyone wanted to do something ethnographic about New York, there’s so much media to draw from. And then I thought, well, what does Beirut have film-wise? Very few films! And none of them are really about the city. They are more about stories that happen in the city, about people more than place. And so it came to me to do a film about Beirut. A lot of this interest also came from the interviews I did with [architect] Bernard [Khoury] during Sector Zero. We didn’t end up using the majority of the interviews that we shot for that film because he and I just kept going on tangents and talking about things other than Karantina. And then listening to the interviews, I realized there was so much information here that could be turned into another film. That’s when I got this idea of making a film about Beirut, and that’s why it’s so rooted in architecture—it came from the conversations I was having with an architect. And I like this idea of talking about a city or reflecting on a city through its material existence. With Beirut, and maybe with any city, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of immediately talking about politics, political divides, and social unrest, and right now the economic collapse. But for me, the manifestation of those things is in the material, what a lot of people might call the fabric of the city. The political-social situation is reflected in the buildings, but I also think that the buildings and the way Beirut is designed are, in turn, encouraging a certain way of living and a certain way of behaving. It’s kind of like a back-and-forth. One of the easiest ways for me to think about it is by thinking about the relationship between people and their houses. It is common to think that the character of a house is dictated by how its occupants decorate it, live in it, and divide it. That’s true to a certain extent, but at the same time, the way people live in their apartments is dictated by the way that those apartments were designed. Very few people design their own apartments. We find an apartment building, we rent an apartment, and that’s it. And I think that’s where it becomes like a back-and-forth situation. I didn’t build this building; I didn’t design it from the inside. My surrounding areas are not how I’d like them to be. So we have all these variables that we’re forced to deal with and then we start to find our own place within them.
Image from After the End of the World (2022
GB: In both of your documentaries, you really shy away from giving a straightforward presentation of all the facts and figures, names and dates related to Beirut. In fact, your documentaries don’t do that at all.
NM: Well, that comes down to the way I think of documentary filmmaking in general. I think it was [Werner] Herzog who really made me think about this. There’s a big difference between fact and truth. We often think they’re one and the same, but there’s a big difference between what is factual and what is truthful. The best example of that for me would be if I wanted to read about the Second World War. I could pick up one history book that gives me the dates and names of all the people involved in the war and when certain things happened, but then you could also find the journal of a soldier on the frontlines, and it might even contradict a lot of the facts. And yet, in a certain sense, it might be more truthful. So you have these two different paths. There isn’t one that’s more important than the other. They need each other to exist, but my intention was to go for the second type, to try to understand a space through people who live in it and the people who have engaged with it.
GB: This actually leads us to, I think, a very important point. Your new film is a documentary, but there are elements of fiction weaved into it. So this idea of getting at truth without facts is quite interesting. Even with Sector Zero, your films play with genre. Even though you’re making documentaries, you dabble with horror and apocalyptic sci-fi. What’s going on here?
NM: Yes, this goes back to the same idea. If you want a strictly factual documentary—let’s say a National Geographic or BBC style documentary—the sheer fact that you have chosen a specific subject matter is automatically subjective. So the content might be based on facts, but your interest in it is not, and even more than that, your selection of people to interview is not. Similarly, the places you decide to focus on, the perspectives on history that you decide to create are also subjective. There is so much subjectivity in making a documentary, and I just wanted to go all the way with it. That’s also the way I worked with the rest of the crew. I wanted them to have their own input. I wanted to document their experiences making the film as well. Because they might not feel the same way I do towards this subject matter, so it was very important for them to also have a say. You know, the cinematographer would say, “I like this shot,” or “I like this building,” or, “What do you think about that?” or, “What do you think about this?” The sound designer—same thing. I don’t take any production sound on set which means that the entire soundtrack is done in the studio, and I do that deliberately so that the people working the sound can also decide what we listen to or what we don’t listen to or what we’re hearing or what we’re not hearing, making it even more of a personal experience. It works for us. Even if it’s not always factually correct, it definitely portrays what I want it to portray; it gives the impression that I wanted it to give.
Werner Herzog suggested this before, this difference between fact and truth. The way I understand it is that what may seem true to some people—truth obviously being very subjective—may not be factually accurate. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for whatever reason, the truth remains more meaningful. The painter Francis Bacon also refers to something similar when he describes painting portraits. He said that in order to reach a more accurate depiction of a person, it is often necessary to distort the face; he would often find that when painting someone with a round face, for example, he would actually paint the face more ovular in order to reach a more accurate impression. It sounds strange, but when you look at the photograph and then at Bacon’s painting of the photograph, his distortion is quite clear, and yet it does look like the face in the photograph. So working on the film was very much like that—relying on memories and dreams as a reference to the city rather than whatever was dictated by a more literal and traditional rendering of the city’s history. And I think this is an approach several directors have used here. There is no consensual history of Beirut or Lebanon. And this void might be what invites filmmakers to be more subjective while telling stories.
GB: After the End of the World is all about the appearance and disappearance of buildings, but what I found equally dizzying is the appearance and disappearance of time. In the film, dates go backwards and forwards. At one point, you’re talking about contemporary Beirut, but then you go backwards, comparing it to Gaza 2018, Damascus 2015, Baghdad 2003, and all the way back to Beirut 1975. As you explicitly put it at one point in the film, the present, the past, and even the future all begin blurring together. Can you talk about your interest in time and the way you play with it in the film?
NM: Well, I bring it up several times. I think this is taken from William Burroughs. It’s not possible to alter space without also altering time. You can’t really talk about one without automatically talking about the other. And I bring that up in the scene in Basta, for example, the antique quarter. If you’ve been here long enough to have some kind of meaningful experiences in this city, walking through it feels like you’re walking through time, not space. I’m assuming this happens in every city, but because of Beirut’s very unregulated urban sprawl, there’s a lot of subjectivity even in the way we maintain our facades and the way we dress up our stores. There’s something completely personal about the whole thing. This film is about remembering things and the discrepancies between what you remember and what actually happened, or at least how what you remember changes your perception of what you are looking at at any present moment. At the end of the film, the voice over expresses how Beirut is caught between a past that won’t die and a future that’s been cancelled. In a sense, there’s a kind of timelessness to Beirut. It’s not timeless; it’s not what we would call timeless, but there’s a timelessness in the sense that you don’t feel you’re moving forward or backward. You don’t feel the past is actually past. You feel that it’s kind of lingering. There’s a kind of haunted feeling to a lot of places in Beirut. And I think that our relationship towards the city’s own history is affecting that perception. When you have, for example, seventeen thousand people still missing and unaccounted for, the past is definitely still part of our lives, and for a lot of families, there is no closure whatsoever.
GB: A lot of Lebanese filmmakers and writers have in the post-war period—insofar as there is a post-war period—continued to talk about how the civil war still shapes and haunts them. Is there something you want to get across about this haunting that you haven’t really seen done?
NM: I think that’s a very valid sentiment a lot of people feel. The orchestrators of the war are still around. They’re still in government. The militias who were fighting the war, for the most part, were never held accountable. They were pardoned. And they ended up, you know, becoming the different political structures: the internal security, the army, the customs. All these different political outlets were built around what was going on during the war. So in that sense, the war didn’t have a definite end. Also, what I mention in the film is that the perspectives that were created during the war still exist. We don’t call it East Beirut and West Beirut anymore, but in the recent elections, for example, you have Beirut 1 and Beirut 2. I mean, it’s quite clear that there is a division and that they are stamped into our mind. Consider the reconstruction efforts, for example. The center of the city was originally a place where everyone mingled. Rich and poor together were mingling in this one space, the old souk. The fact that they turned it into this kind of shopping mall cemented the idea that, you know what, it’s no longer a place to mingle; it’s going to remain this kind of neutral space, almost like a buffer zone, which is now completely empty. There’s nothing there anymore. Very few people have offices; all the shops have closed down. Beirut Central District is not central at all. It might be central geographically, but it is in no way the center of the city. It houses nothing.
GB: When you made Sector Zero there was a little bit of life in this central district, Solidere. I remember seeing some high-end shopping, a few scattered cafes. The real cavity was Karantina. In the years that have passed, that cavity seems to have grown and encompassed Solidere.
NM: Yes, that’s a good point. The void is expanding. It’s like a black hole.
GB: I do want to ask you about the personal. You really put yourself into After the End of the World in a way that you didn’t in Sector Zero. You even included some old news footage from when you were a child and some journalists were interviewing your mother. It’s pretty clear in the film that the loss of your father becomes a metaphor for what’s happened—after the end of the war, after the end of your father. Can you talk about this aspect of the film? Did you always intend to be so personal in the film or is that something that came later on?
NM: No, that came way later. In fact, I originally came up with the first idea for the film when my dad was still alive. It was the last year of his life. We didn’t know that at the time, of course. The original idea for the film was quite different and not at all personal. And then slowly, I found it difficult to think about the city without thinking about my experiences within it. So I’d think about a certain area or a certain building or a certain event that happened in the nineties, for example, and I’d automatically find myself thinking about what I was doing there at the time. And slowly the personal aspect started creeping in. And the moment we decided to make me one of the characters, that’s when it just kind of took off. In fact, the idea of the film was very shaky in the beginning. We’d managed to get funding very early on, and then we realized, actually, we’re not ready to start filming it at all! So we had this funding, and my producer [Georges Schoucair] kept commenting on this, saying that most directors have an idea but can’t get the money for it; you’ve got the money for it, but you still don’t know what you’re doing! He said, you kind of did it backwards. So it took a long time to finalize the ideas. The original idea of the film was for half of it to be completely fiction, like with fictional characters, and to sort of go back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. That idea eventually got scrapped. It became much simpler as time went on.
GB: You mentioned Mean Streets and Werner Herzog, and I am curious if you could talk about any other influences that may not be obvious to most of us.
NM: Well, I’m not crazy about Mean Streets. It wasn’t an inspiration other than it triggered an idea in my head.
GB: OK, but the first time I watched Sector Zero, it was immediately apparent to me that you were a fan of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
NM: Yes.
GB: I’m curious about the new film. What other inspirations did you have?
NM: It wasn’t the same. With Sector Zero I wanted to make a horror film and a documentary so I made both at the same time, basically. After the End of the World wasn’t as straightforward. I wanted it to be very stylized. I like stylized documentaries. I like playing around with the color. In this film, for example, we decided to make it blue. The colorist [Belal Hibri] pointed out that Mediterranean settings are quite warm, obviously because of the climate, and I wanted to go in the complete opposite direction. In this film, I’m talking about an imagined Beirut. I’m talking about the one of my dreams and the one of my memories: a completely different kind of city. I want it to be something kind of dreamy. So we filmed it using a filter to soften the image, kind of to break up the sharpness of digital video. And then we decided to make the whole image blue. The idea of doing that with a city actually comes from [Jean-Luc] Godard and his film Alphaville. That film in particular really kind of stuck with me because it was a science-fiction film, but he didn’t make any sets; he didn’t have any kind of special effects. He managed to create a sense of the future, a sense that the film is happening later on, a kind of dystopia, just by filming really interesting angles and choosing the right buildings. So you have this feeling in Alphaville that you’re in this completely fabricated sci-fi world, but it’s actually just Paris filmed from a different perspective. That idea stuck with me. For me, Beirut is very much a sci-fi city. It’s very dystopian. How can we bring that into this film, this idea that it’s kind of a dreamscape?
GB: I was quite taken with the music you composed for the film. Are you somebody who starts writing music before you even start filming or does it come at the very end after you have completed the edit? What is your process?
NM: With both Sector Zero and After the End of the World, the ideas for the music started before I started filming. I had ideas for the music from the outset. And in fact, I had playlists on my laptop that I created specifically to listen to when I was writing the films—music that just kind of inspired the feeling that I was trying to get across. So throughout the process of making After the End of the World, over the seven or eight years I was writing the film, I was also, you know, saving different sketches, different ideas for music. I’d be working on the music for another film, and I would get an idea and think, “That would be good for my film.” I usually edit with temp music, but I don’t finish my music until the very end. It’s the first thing I start with, and it’s the thing I end with. It takes the entire scope of the filmmaking process, but again, because it’s my film and I’m doing the music, the temp music that I choose is very on the nose. Certain scenes are filmed even with a piece of music in mind. And I’ve realized that I’m quite slow at making music. I always thought I was quite quick, but actually I’m quite slow. Sometimes you really just have to leave the ideas and let them develop in your head. Sometimes you just have to leave it there for three months, six months and then come back to it.
GB: One of your interviewees, Bernard Khoury, says something very controversial in the film.
NM:“Arabs have given up on modernity.” I mean, he’s a very controversial character. And I know a lot of people are very critical of his work and ideas. I’m not going to say that I disagree with anything he says, but there are some things that I think are worth discussing, definitely. I left that in there deliberately. Again, going back to this idea of subjectivity, you decide what to keep and what to remove. I decided to keep that because I think it’s an argument worth having. It’s definitely an idea that we can discuss, and it is very relevant to anyone living here in this part of the world.
GB: I think the question some people watching the film mighthave is, did the Arabs give up on modernity or did modernity give up on the Arabs?
NM: I don’t think every Arab country is experiencing modernity the same way, so making a broad statement like that is already a bit problematic anyway. But I think when it comes to certain places, places that I would say share a history—Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq—they are experiencing modernity in a very different way because they’re very rooted in tradition, and very rooted in their own history, and they are, coincidentally or not coincidentally, being completely torn to pieces. Bernard’s argument here is that you can have skyscrapers and high-tech lifestyles, but that doesn’t mean that you’re modern. It has nothing to do with modernity. Modernity is something that has to come naturally from within a space; it’s not something you import from somewhere else. It would have been far more interesting, I think, if the Gulf states, for example, had tried to incorporate their desert environment into their modernity rather than trying to build Chicago in the middle of the desert. So how can sand dunes and rock formations and this climate and the colors, how can that become part of our identity of a modern world? Modernity for Lebanon is obviously very difficult. It brought along a whole history of trauma that we’re still facing. I think that every few years you’re reminded that the people here are very torn between what has already happened and what’s about to happen. And I think, again, what he meant in the interview is that is we tend to focus just on those two things. Here, people are either obsessed with the past or obsessed with the future. No one’s paying attention to what’s going on right now.
GB: What do you prefer to be known as? A Lebanese filmmaker? A Beiruti filmmaker?
NM: No, just filmmaker. I don’t like being referred to as being from a specific place—just the filmmaker who happens to live in Beirut.
GB: For someone who is so obsessed with Beirut, it’s interesting you don’t want that designation.
NM: I guess, for a whole bunch of other reasons that are unrelated to the film. Or to what we’re talking about.
GB: No, but I think it’s true. You are a filmmaker, and there’s a way that certain people get fetishized and known for their identity or geography more than for their actual work.
NM: There’s a tendency when it comes to what people call world cinema, a term I don’t like so much. The moment someone comes from a non-Anglophone background, we immediately feel the need to stick some kind of nationality label on that person. So, we kind of take it for granted, Steven Spielberg is a filmmaker. Why didn’t you say he’s an American filmmaker or whatever? No, it’s OK just to call him a filmmaker. But if you mention [Abbas] Kirostami, we have to mention he’s Iranian. I think it has a lot to do with identity politics, the fact that some people enjoy riffing off the attention you get from being from a specific part of the world. I think I’m just more interested in making films and hoping people like them regardless of who I am or where I come from. I want them to look at the film before they look at anything else. So, I’m just composer and filmmaker. That’s it.