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By Helena Argyle.
London, 31 March 2014:
A film set during the 17 February Revolution was shown last week in London as part . . .[restrict]of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
First to Fall is a documentary set in the heart of the Libyan revolution. It was made by Rachel Beth Anderson, an American journalist who attended the London screenings to talk about her work. The documentary is the culmination of three years work by Anderson and two Libyans, Hamid and Tarek. During the revolution, they filmed hundreds of hours of footage, much of it on the front-line of fighting in Misrata.
Anderson, who had been a reporter in Cairo in the early days of the Arab Spring, paid special attention to the plight of the Libyan ‘freedom fighters,’ as well as the people of Libya. What had been comparatively short-lived uprisings in other Arab Spring countries, in Libya became a long, drawn-out battle that lasted eight months.
In First to Fall, Anderson’s focus is on the younger men and women of Libya. It follows those young revolutionaries who, through a certain sense of national spirit and united hatred of the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, set out on a youthfully-naïve journey into the face of war.
Her story watches two Libyan-born friends Hamid and Tarek. After living in Canada for the preceding eight years, as the revolution gained momentum, they returned to their homeland. They wanted to unite with their people on the front-line of an extraordinarily brutal and historically-significant uprising against a long-standing regime.
Using a collection of video footage filmed by herself and several revolutionaries, Anderson documents the pair’s travels to Misrata and their experiences fighting in the front-line against the persistent resistance of the old regime.
To London audiences unfamiliar with the intricacies of the revolution, much of the footage offered an eye-opening and a traumatic insight into the brutal realities of a front-line that was manned by young revolutionaries whose passions far outweighed their military expertise. In the film, those shown fighting against Qaddafi never fail to display a strong sense of camaraderie.
The characters in First to Fall are also capable of bringing light and humour to the most tragic and difficult circumstances.
Hamid, who is portrayed as somewhat more instinctively suited to the battlefield, shows a genuine interest in the fighting. Despite his years spent in Canada, he has kept a strong sense of his Libyan identity and takes to shooting and running through the middle of the action with little difficulty.
He is an effective contrast to Tarek, a more sensitive character in the face of the brutal adversity that they encountered in Libya.
Tarek, who takes up weapons only later, shows a tender reluctance to be on the front-line. Tragically, he gets severely injured and, at the end of the film, is depicted in the present-day, back in Canada, wheelchair bound and in a great deal of pain.
Hamid, too, ages during the revolution and Anderson portrays how, for both of them, the revolution saw their early innocence lost in the experiences of war.
Rachel spent three years working on the film. She has kept in contact with Hamid and Tarek despite, she said, the notorious difficulty of getting a Libyan to answer one of his many phones.
To find out more about the film or to watch the trailer, click here. [/restrict]
