Programs Calendar Films

In 1989, at the age of twenty-one, the young Lebanese woman Souha Béchara attempted to assassinate General Antoine Lahad, who was collaborating with the Israeli Army in the South of Lebanon.

Lahad survived, but Souha, a devoted communist, was quickly arrested and thrown in the Khiam prison where she spent the next ten years, six in solitary confinement. Totally isolated in a tiny cell and tortured repeatedly, Souha's refusal to collaborate with her jailers made her a legend. She was freed in 1998 after an international campaign.

After her release, Souha arrived at the Paris home of filmmaker Randa Sabbag. From that day on, Sabbag filmed Souha, who began to pour out all of the words that had been forbidden during her captivity. It seemed as if this liberation of her speech would externalize her suffering.

When Souha returned to Lebanon for the first time (after the May 2000 Israeli withdrawal and collapse of General Lahad's militia) Sabbag accompanied her. Souha follows her emotional homecoming in the village of Deir Mimas, her return to the spot of the attempted assassination, her visit to Khiam prison, and her meetings with fellow former prisoners, men and women, secularists and Islamists alike.

Despite all her suffering, Souha is a survivor who shares her story with a sense of hope for the future - both her own and that of Lebanon.

Randa Chahal Sabbag was born in Tripoli, Lebanon. She studied film at the University of Vincennes and the School of Louis Lumiére in France. She directed numerous documentaries, short films, and television programs before her first feature film, Sand Screens (1991). Her second feature film, A Civilized People (1998), a black comedy about the Lebanese Civil War, was censored in Lebanon. She refused to make edits to her film that the Ministry of Interior's military censors proposed, which resulted in her being vilified in the press and her family receiving death threats. In 2004, she was awarded with the nation's highest honor, a Chevalier of the Order of the Cedar, for her contributions to Lebanon.