A Man Returned

“Are you busy?”, Reda asks his future wife on the phone. “I spend a lot of time thinking about our new life”, he says. “I mean, it might get really tough, our new life, and neither of us has tried it before. We’ll just have to make the impossible possible. With our love, our trust and our mutual understanding”. Reda is 26 years old. For the past three years he’s been living in Athens, hand-to-mouth and on petty crimes. He wanted to be recognised as a refugee in Europe. It didn’t work. Now he’s back at the place he originally fled from, Ain El-Helweh, the largest refugee camp in Lebanon. He is intent on creating a better life himself. The dream wedding will happen. The reality of the camp is the soil upon which the dreams are to sprout from. With drugs, or with drugs. With a war in Syria that can also be felt at the refugee camp. With confidence. For years now, director Mahdi Fleifel has been accompanying the men of his youth with a video camera in the style of Direct Cinema, thereby creating a proximity to his protagonists and their personal circumstances that could hardly be more immediate.