This event will screen the documentary The Soil and The Sea followed by a Q&A with the Director, Daniele Rugo and Producer, Carmen Hassoun Abou Jaoudé.
In Lebanon there are more than 100 untouched mass graves dating back from the Civil War, and thousands of families awaiting a missing relative or at least a bone to bury. The Soil and the Sea unveils the violence lying beneath a garden, a school, a cafe, a hotel, and other unremarkable landscapes. As the camera interrogates these everyday spaces, voices fill them with erased stories. This documentary stands as the first record of these sites, threatened by neglect, real estate developments, and oblivion.
Daniele Rugo is an award winning filmmaker and Professor of Film at Brunel University London. His previous film About a War (2019, co-directed with Abi Weaver), explores social change through the stories of former militiamen from Lebanon’s civil war. He has published extensively on conflict and the arts and his work has been funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, and Global Challenges Research Fund. He has been a Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security from 2020 to 2023.
Carmen Hassoun Abou Jaoudé is a researcher and lecturer in political science and transitional justice at the American University of Beirut and Saint Joseph University of Beirut. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked with the International Centre for Transitional Justice where she served as Head of its program and as Head of its office in Lebanon. From 2016 to 2022 she was a Board member of the NGO Act for the Disappeared. Her fields of research include post-war memory in Lebanon and the issue of missing persons and transitional justice. In July 2020, she was appointed as a member of the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared.
Anne Kirstine Rønn is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. Her postdoctoral research focuses on Lebanese and Iraqi labour movements and examines their potential as oppositional forces against the ruling elites of the two countries. Specifically, she investigates the dynamics of trade unions and other alternative forms of labour mobilisation in the aftermath of the 2019 uprisings.
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