Chawki Azoury

The apocalyptic blast in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon, on August 4, 2020, exacerbates anger at those in power: protests cross religious boundaries as the Lebanese people curse corruption, nepotism, gross economic mismanagement and squandering of resources. How did the Land of Cedars, a country with so much to offer, allow itself to get into such a dire situation? And will it be able to bounce back?

Through a closed study of the notorious, now derelict district of Karantina, Sector Zero uses Karantina’s history as a metaphor for Lebanon’s own troubled past, suggesting that by denying their traumas, the Lebanese people have entered a downward spiral into the abyss that is their own collective unconscious. The film is not so much a documentation as it is an exploration into the dark corners of modern Lebanon’s collective memory in an attempt to discover how much of who we are is based largely on that part of ourselves we have chosen to forget.