Director: Zehra Eekhout
Running time: 32mins
In the world of documentaries, some topics aren’t naturally suited to hands-off, short-form storytelling. The long, long list of problems facing the citizens of Lebanon would require a substantially longer run-time than Burst Out’s 32 minutes to give viewers outside the country a sufficient understanding of them. And they certainly require more input than the brief text-crawl which director Zehra Eekhout has decided to place at the end of her film. With that being said, the morsels of information that does come at the start of the closing credits supplies enough insight that many of the film’s topics suddenly feel like they make a lot more sense.
Over the course of the last half-hour, composer Sami Serhan, singer Noura Badran and photographer Jana Khoury have been speaking about their feelings toward the Egg – an abandoned brutalist building in downtown Beirut. Jana remembers the Egg becoming the heart of mass protests in 2019, amid mass-unemployment, huge inflation, and increasing taxation of citizens. Noura has hopes that the Egg might still have a future as somewhere to perform opera. Sami flippantly laughs that it should be destroyed. Through it all, there are areas in which we can vaguely relate to this discourse – every city in the world has its ugly, abandoned buildings, which become a focal point for debates about public life there. But the film doesn’t really succeed in building on those areas where we can empathise, to draw us into a more specific story about life in Lebanon.
Not until that last burst of text, anyway. Taking its name from its ovular shape, the deflated concrete balloon known as the Egg was originally built by architect Joseph Philippe Karam in the 1960s. It was intended to be used as a cinema in a broader commercial complex, but was abandoned before being put to use, amid the Lebanese Civil War. Despite significant public investment in its creation, what was meant to be a hub for people to gather and engage in culture remains disused – and is officially closed to the public, as it is owned by a private real-estate ‘redevelopment’ company which, despite fine promises, doesn’t seem to see how it could profit from doing anything with it.
With this context finally being fed to us, it becomes clear what the Egg is to our subjects. To Sami, who tellingly produces an organic sci-fi-horror score inspired by the abandoned concrete, it is the embarrassing failures of Beirut’s past writ large in the city skyline – the needs and welfare of the public buried beneath decades of political squabbling and corporate corruption. Walking through the ghosts of once-vibrant images she captured in 2019, Jana meanwhile sees it as a memorial to the potential power of collective struggle, as well as a sad reminder of failed revolts gone by. Finally, as she performs an optimistic operatic solo within the echoing chamber of the Egg, Noura sees it as an emblem of a Lebanon that could still be – a country whose people could still rise to reclaim from its corrupted past, and remould it as a place of joy and humanity.
There is suddenly so much to think about. It’s just a pity that it has all manifested in the final moments of a half-hour film, when many viewers who aren’t aware of this context may well have already checked out. Indeed, one simple way to immediately elevate this film would be to place this text crawl at the opening of the film – not at its conclusion. Even better, Eekhout might find a way to draw all that information out of her subjects, who brush by it without delivering a meatier level of context for viewers to really get their teeth into.
At the same time, Eekhout doesn’t really find a way to bring their somewhat disparate strands together, in what would have made for a much more compelling finale. While I understand that perhaps it might be easier said than done to schedule these three different artists to meet at a single time and place, to bring them together to discuss their unique experiences and opinions on the Egg – and on the past, present and future of Lebanon – would have made a fascinating watch. Would they have all just disagreed, would some possibly have shifted their position more or less optimistically, or would they have reached a new synthesis of perspectives?
Similarly, their three art-forms might have been brought into more of a synthesis than the editing ever quite ventures to deliver. Sami’s gorgeous synth score fades away just in time for Noura’s equally beautiful song – while the vivacious imagery of Jana also forfeits the stage. With one of those images having shown a guerilla projection putting the Egg to its original, intended use as a cinema, I was left imagining a wonderous scenario where all three creators collaborated to play us out – Sami constructing a synth performance to complement Noura’s vocals, while Jana selects impactful imagery to project across the Egg’s graffiti-strewn inner walls. As cleanly shot, and impeccably scored as the film is, nothing in it quite packs close to that kind of thematic, audio-visual punch.
There is plenty of food for thought in Zehra Eekhout’s short documentary – and that is the most important thing for this kind of film. It scratches beneath the surface of a country whose people are most often either portrayed as hapless victims of circumstance, or endlessly corrupt politicians, to depict the kind of determined and creative people you would not believe existed, if all you had to go on was the news coverage of Lebanon’s woes. The film’s problems stem from a lack of context – which its ending provides too late to engage most audiences – and a need to serve us up something a little more creative, in terms of drawing out debate and discussion among its three subjects.