Community Researchers. Still from 'It was a river'. 2019

In a film-as-research workshop run by CatalyticAction and UCL researchers Hanna Baumann and Hannah Sender, community researchers in Bar Elias explored the possibility of using film-making as a way of learning about the town. Specifically, they were investigating the relationship between infrastructures in the town and vulnerability. The researchers - from Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian communities - shared a concern about the Litani River. They talked at length about its importance to the town's agriculture and to its social life, and bemoaned its pollution by factories upstream. Two of the researchers dedicated a film to the issue, speaking to farmers, vegetable-sellers, and long-term residents of Bar Elias about the pollution and its effect on the social and economic life of the town. They filmed children playing in the river, despite widespread concerns about its effects on people's health.

In the film, the Litani is not simply associated with flows of harmful chemicals and the threat posed by unfettered industrial activity. It is also mourned as a lost natural asset: a body of water contributes to the sense of Bar Elias as a place that is defined by its natural resources. The Litani defines the town in the literal sense, as it forms a natural border of the northern edge. It is also a prominent feature in people's collective imagination of the town: residents and people who visited have fond memories of the Litani as a place of leisure and togetherness, and which many young people still value as a place to spend time with friends, family and alone with one’s thoughts. The body of water is therefore not merely an infrastructure, but a place-defining existent that cannot be subtracted from the place of Bar Elias as a physically- and virtually-existing place. The Litani, described as having been ‘tyrannised’ by the corrupt activities of institutions, is something which had been alive, which was a vital source for the town's fields, but is on the cusp of Nonlife. Even if poisoned, it will still flow, but there will be no life there. And what happens then, to people’s sense of Bar Elias, so tied up as it is in the presence and vitality of the Litani?