Editor’s Pitch

2010’s Oscar Winning The Hurt Locker, showed the world a slice of the day to day non-stop tension that army personnel went through to clear devices intended to kill during wartime. No politics, just process. This, however, is a beautifully made, very moving story of civilians clearing explosives in peacetime, where process gives way to human context, loss and the long-term emotional and physical destruction of war’s aftermath. Walking through an orange grove has never felt so threatening.


Cluster bombs are ugly, highly destructive weapons that rain down on a target to inflict maximum damage. Thousands of such weapons, releasing millions of tiny bomblets, fell on the Lebanon during Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah during 2006. But cluster bombs are not only ugly - they are prone to malfunction. A huge percentage never exploded, turning them from bombs into mines. Today the Lebanon is littered with this deadly seed – in gardens, streets, backyards, school playgrounds, country roads – step on one and you could lose a limb, your sight, or even your life. The effort to find them and make them safe before they kill again is a long and difficult journey.

Two years in the making, Remnants of a War is an intimate portrait of the ordinary Lebanese men and women who risk their lives to make their country a safe place to live. Organised by NGOs rather than the army, these people are driven by different desires. For some it is an adventure, for others a way to pay for their dream home, for many they have no other way to support themselves, their previous careers destroyed in the conflict.

Clearing cluster bombs by blowing them up is daily occurrence in the Lebanon, so much so that 1pm is designated the time for “demining”. Every lunch time, explosions reverberate around a country supposedly living in peacetime.

Director Jawad Metni’s use of music and classically beautiful images magnifies and turns on its head our idea of both the Lebanon and the perception of deadly threat. Here people work together to try and find a way out of a situation they realise to be illogical and seemingly without end, not wanting to be angry, but never able to forget their losses and the fear of more to come.