On August 4, , my city exploded. It was the last thing Lebanon needed. The country was already facing tremendously hard times: an economic meltdown , a currency collapse, soaring poverty rates , gas strikes , a massive protest movement , and a pandemicβall of this in addition to the normalized, status quo pollution , corruption, regional military tensions, entrenched sectarianism, and electricity blackouts that were rapidly increasing in frequency and duration.
As if things were not already turbulent enough, just after p. By most estimates, it was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions that the world had ever seen. The force of the blast threw me onto the floor, and I hid under a wooden stool as a giant mushroom cloud filled the sky. In an instant, the world turned dark, and Beirut took the guise of a war zone.
Walls collapsed, vehicles were smashed, and windows across the city were transformed into weapons. Beirut, already a city of shattered dreams, suddenly became a city of shattered glass. Over people were killed , tens of thousands were injured, and more than a quarter of a million were made homeless. Beirut has certainly seen its share of trauma in the past half century. However, despite this tumultuous history, nothing could have prepared us for that calamitous day in August Despite my proximity to the explosion, my body was spared.
I was one of the lucky ones, but the stress and emotional turmoil I experienced were still immense. For the next few weeks, I caught myself randomly weeping, and every time I heard a loud sound like a plane or a garbage truck, I flinched and almost ducked for cover.
In the midst of this madness, I needed an escape, an outletβa window into another world. I needed some distance, some sort of reminder that my current reality was not the only reality. As strange as it sounds, I found myself looking for this escape in the most unexpected of places: Icelandic cinema.
