Samer Beyhum chose to stay in Lebanon with his beloved family

Photo: Photo provided Samer Beyhum does not want to leave Lebanon, especially because his mother and relatives do not have this option.

Sarah R. Champagne

Published at 12:00 am

• Middle East

• 60~/li>

“Get out of Lebanon while you can”: Canada’s message to its citizens and permanent residents has been clear for a year. Its calls intensified on September 23, as Israel began killing civilians in the country, including in downtown Beirut. Why do we choose to stay in a state at war when we could leave it ?

Violence is always a good reason to leave, but Samer Beyhum has too many reasons to stay in Lebanon—and his loved ones have too few options to follow him. First, there is his mother, who has already made her choice and does not have a Canadian passport anyway. And, in addition to his blood family, there is also his heart: leaving them would make the departure too heartbreaking.

The person to whom he feels “closest in the world,” his friend and colleague, is unable to come to Canada. And there is Maram, a young woman who participated in a documentary and a fiction film made by Mr. Beyhum and his students. A Syrian refugee, she has no papers, even in Lebanon. “I feel responsible for it,” summarizes the documentary filmmaker.

Photo: Photo provided by Samer Beyhum Young Maram participated in a documentary and a fiction film made by Canadian-Lebanese Samer Beyhum and his students.

“How would I feel if I left the country and left everyone behind while they were being bombed and I was safe ? I couldn’t live with myself,” he says during a video call with Le Devoir from his apartment in downtown Beirut.

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A few flashes of nostalgia pass through his eyes. “Montreal is my other home, for sure.” But if he returned to Lebanon after eight years in the metropolis, it was to bring back some of what he learned in Quebec and build something else. “As a filmmaker, I want to expose important social issues.” I want to contribute, I want to make films that are collaborative efforts, to shine a light on social movements,” he lists.

These issues are so acute and the injustices are so deep that everything has to be done, Beyhum said. “I can’t just transfer all my work. I don’t want to just throw away everything I’ve done here, and the people with it.” »

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Cultivating a little hope

You have to have experienced war several times to know that a bomb that falls two kilometers away has detonated “relatively far away,” and that is his case. “I was a child during the civil war. I grew up thinking that war and its ugliness were the norm. We live in a country where everyone is traumatized,” observes the filmmaker.

Despite the love he has for his loved ones and for the defenders of social justice in Lebanon, he does not hide the fact that his current vision of things is dark. Beyond the “completely disproportionate” violence of Israel, according to Mr. Beyhum, he fears that the dividing lines that cross the country will deepen further. In Lebanon, people still identify themselves a lot by their faith (Muslim, Christian, etc.), or even by their sect (Shiite, Sunni, etc.), he explains. “People no longer differentiate between Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims. Israel makes sure they are not given any refuge.”

This is history repeating itself, and not just that of the civil war from 1975 to 1990. More recently, in the last decade, it has been refugees from Syria who have been ostracized. “Motorcycles with loudspeakers would drive around the shops where they worked, telling them to leave the country immediately or they would be dealt with.”

From Beirut, he can sometimes feel the vibrations of the bombs—and hear them too—but he considers his apartment relatively quiet. What makes his daily life sometimes unbearable is the presence of planes that break the sound barrier and drones. “It’s designed to terrorize us. It sends the message ‘We can hit you,’ creating a lot of fear and tension,” he says.

If it were easier for his loved ones to find a quiet place close to the country, he might consider leaving Lebanon. But the only Lebanese passport his loved ones have and the lack of status of his protégée only highlight the abysmal inequality of opportunity and the discrimination of the visa systems, he denounces.

The only thing left to do is to maintain the little hope that remains, since he cannot “wait for it from elsewhere,” he says. “Who will build a better country if everyone leaves ?”