DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

In 2011 I was approached by Ali, an old family friend who handed me a hard-drive full of hundreds of hours of footage that he and his friend Donga shot over the 8 months of the revolution. It contained hand-held footage of my friends, neighbors, and schoolmates holding AK 47s, riding tanks and firing anti-aircrafts. Seeing the destruction of the city I grew up in, burnt bodies, and edited scenes of the “martyrs” being delivered to their families, I unplugged the hard-drive and put it away never to open it again.

Donga’s filming style and the texture of his footage is an important element that shows not only the progression of time but also the development of the character as a cameraman, his style shifts from the enthusiastic full of energy 19-year-old who holds the ideals of the uprising generation to the sober 28-year-old who has lived through almost a decade long conflict, his camera work becomes a little bit more stable, and his movements more calculated but still he maintains his thirst for adrenaline until the moment of the injury where everything stops.

This film is a chance for Donga to deliver the images that he risked his life to record, and for me to explore the bitter reality of the events that continue to shape Libya’s everyday life. It is also a story about Donga, who is left with hundreds of hours of footage of a once hopeful moment of change turned into a decade-long nightmare. His aftermath is one similar to the nation’s: torn, tired and aimless, but still hopeful.