Not nostalgia, but recoveryليس حنيناً، بل استعادة

In Lebanon, ḥmār is the first insult a child learns. I grew up with it too.

Making this film, I spent months on the donkey rescue farms of the Chouf, Beit Chabeb and Jouwar el Hoz, on the terraces of Tannourine where donkeys still work, and in Akkar. Again and again I met an animal that is nothing like the word.

The donkey built our mountain roads and carried our harvests for thousands of years. Then the asphalt came, and with it cars and tractors, and we forgot it, the way this country forgets much of what carried it.

I wanted to film donkeys the way they live: slowly, in long takes and natural light, with the sound of breath and hooves on stone. The voices are few and close: farmers, the people who rescue them, an old muleteer, my own parents.

This is not a film about nostalgia. It is about recovery: of an animal, of a memory, and maybe of a way of living with the land.

— Joe EL Hajj · @j.oha.j