Children of Shatila shows dead bodies, and women weeping as they search through the rubble. It is a nine-month-old baby carried on his mother’s shoulders, hurled away by a piece of shrapnel. The mother dies. The baby is now a man in a wheelchair who has never been able to walk. It is a computer technician forced to collect garbage to survive, wounded in his dignity. Children of Shatila shows a child run over by a car, surviving four fractures to the head and seven to the leg, struggling to keep up with lessons at school. It is an eleven-year-old child who curses the day he was born.

But for the film—and for life—to be bearable, Children of Shatila is also a gang of kids perched on an old cart pulled by a white horse amid traffic. They are children who dance dances passed down from their ancestors and that have survived shelling. They are teenagers who dream of becoming astronauts and doctors among the ruins. It is that eleven-year-old child visited at night by the ghost of his grandmother. It is the smile of that incredible child, filming a parade of clowns in the streets of his asylum, dreaming of the birds of his homeland. Children of Shatila is the crackling of ruins that lets the light through and floods us with it.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk Artistic Director