We Want to Live
2020 · 5m · Lebanon
Directed by Mohammad Assaf, Mayzar Al-Moussa
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Two young men in a Bekaa refugee camp document the morning sounds of agricultural workers — silenced by COVID quarantine, then returning before restrictions are lifted.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A five-minute sound essay about refugee camp mornings doesn't scream radical, but the fact that it treats silence—enforced, pandemic silence—as the actual subject rather than just a backdrop is genuinely weird in the best way; most filmmakers would've gone sentimental, these two went structural.
The formal restraint here echoes the essay film tradition of Marker and Farocki—privileging observed sound and temporal rhythm over narrative arc—though the choice to document absence rather than presence feels like a quiet intervention in the documentary form itself.
The decision to let the returning agricultural sounds carry the entire emotional and political weight of the piece, rather than overlaying commentary or music, is the move that makes this work; two young filmmakers recognizing that the sound design *is* the argument.