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Thoughts on fiming Youssef Bey Karam
July – September 2025



I have been thinking about this film for many years now. I grew up watching the grandiose statue of Youssef Bey Karam every summer, under the heating sun of Lebanon and the breeze of the mountain. The bronze figure stood sentinel against a sky that promised everything and delivered fragments. I watched the statue be replaced, people cheering in their car honks, standing on the balcony watching the hero arrive like some metallic resurrection. The old giving way to the new in that peculiar Lebanese fashion: theatrical, emotional, somehow always incomplete.

I constantly wondered how we come to commemorate national figures when our own vision of the nation state is perhaps not formulated. The postcolonial condition is precisely this: the inheritance of fractured narratives, the burden of constructing identity from the debris of imperial intervention. Within this vein, I am drawn to Youssef Bek Karam precisely because his history highlights a moment in which one once had a clear vision for what Lebanon can be, free from western interventions and colonial power. His rebellion in the 1860s was not merely resistance: it was the articulation of possibility, the audacious imagination of a Lebanon that belonged to itself. In his defiance against the Ottoman administrative reforms imposed by European powers, I see the ghost of what we might have become: a nation that defined itself rather than being defined, that spoke rather than being spoken for. His vision was territorial and spiritual simultaneously, treating the mountains as both refuge and metaphor for independence, the cedar as a symbol not of tourist postcards but of rootedness that could not be uprooted by foreign design.

Soon enough, the war in Palestine started and it was going to reach us precisely because this is how the west has pre-determined our fate using lines, situating us at a close proximity to their forever expansive violent entity. We exist in the margins of someone else's map, our sovereignty always conditional, always temporary. When it reached Lebanon, I was still working on the film, at least from a conceptual standpoint and that in itself has been a major shifting point in my thinking towards a film about the making of a hero. The irony was not lost on me, filming the memory of resistance while resistance was being crushed in real time. The present collapsed into the past with sickening clarity. Every explosion reminded me that Karam's struggle was not an historical artifact but an eternal condition.

It felt that we were constantly going over the cycle of commemorating and setting a precedent for remembering and mourning, an endless loop where each crisis births new martyrs while the old ones gather dust. As the present demanded immediate witness, I realized that making a film about Karam was not about resurrecting a dead hero but about interrogating why we need heroes at all. The statue in my childhood was never really Karam. It was our collective desire for someone else to save us, projected onto bronze. But Karam's actual rebellion was not about becoming a statue; it was about the unglamorous, daily work of building alternative structures, of imagining governance beyond colonial frameworks.

The film remains unmade, and perhaps it should. In this suspension, I find a different kind of honesty: the admission that true resistance might lie not in the commemoration of past heroes but in the refusal to turn our present struggles into future monuments. The real question is not who will save us, but how we might finally learn to save ourselves.

J.J.

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