In the villages and back roads of Akkar and Northern Lebanon, the Civil War did not arrive as front-line combat. It arrived as checkpoints, silence, and the slow erosion of everyday certainty. “Echoes of the North: The Unspoken Memory” follows the buried testimonies of those who lived through this quieter, less-documented experience: the fear that shaped daily routines, the disappearances that were never explained, and the long shadow of the Syrian presence that followed the war itself.

Through first-person interviews, many gathered for the first time, cinematic reenactments, restored archival photographs, and a soundscape woven from oral histories, the film reconstructs a memory that was never given a public voice. It gives particular weight to women’s experiences, so often absent from the region’s historical record, and traces how trauma is carried, distorted, or lost across generations - from grandparents to parents to a younger generation growing up with only fragments of the story.

“Echoes of the North” is not a history lesson. It is an act of listening, an attempt to give shape to what an entire region agreed, for decades, not to say out loud.

I grew up hearing the North described in broad outline, never in detail; a place the war had “passed over,” as if passing over left nothing behind. It took years of conversations in Akkar’s villages to understand how wrong that outline was. The war did not spare the North; it simply never gave it permission to speak.

This film began with listening, not filming. Before a single frame was shot, we sat with residents, many of them elderly women who had never been asked to share their stories before and let their memories shape the project rather than forcing those memories into a structure we had already established. What we found was not one war story, but many quiet ones: a checkpoint remembered by its smell, a disappearance never mentioned again after it happened, a silence passed from mother to daughter without either of them ever naming what it was.

My aim as director is to resist the instinct to over-narrate this material. Where the testimony is fragmented, the film remains fragmented. Where memory is contradictory, we let the contradiction stand. The reenactments are deliberately minimal and symbolic rather than literal, gestures and spaces rather than dramatized events. These stories were never experienced as cinema; they were experienced as absence. The film tries to honor that texture rather than smooth it over.

Ultimately, this is a film about who gets remembered nationally and who does not. For fifty years, Akkar and the North have been treated as peripheral to Lebanon’s war narrative. Echoes of the North does not claim to correct that record. It simply insists that the record is incomplete and that the people who lived through it are still here to say so.

Echoes of the North: The Unspoken Memory is a documentary art film that reclaims the collective memory of the Lebanese Civil War in Tripoli and Akkar (1975–1986) through the first-person testimonies of sixteen witnesses who lived through it. Rather than presenting a dry historical account, the film follows an ascending five-chapter chronology: from the war’s first tremors and the rise of political polarization (1975–1976), through the arrival of Syrian forces under the Arab Deterrent Force and the reshaping of local power (1976–1982), to the Battle of Tripoli and Arafat’s departure (1983); the escalating violence and erasure that followed; the port massacre, the Balha explosion, the assassination of Abu Arabi, and the rise of the Tawhid movement (1983–1986); and, finally, the December 1986 killing of Syrian soldiers and the storming of Bab al-Tabbaneh, a defining wound in the North’s collective memory. Witnesses from Tripoli and from Akkar villages such as Berkayel and Tel Abbas speak side by side, establishing the North not as a passive periphery but as a central and contested arena of the war.

Visually and sonically, the film is built around four interlocking layers: witnesses speaking on camera in their own environments, without a narrator’s voice overriding their lived experience; archival newspapers, photographs, and maps from 1975–1986; the camera returning to present-day Bab al-Tabbaneh, the port, al-Qubba, Jabal Mohsen, the old markets, and Akkar’s villages to ask what remains in the stones and silences; and a soundscape built from field recordings and layered composition that evokes the era without resorting to literal reenactment. The material also serves as the raw archive for the project’s second component, the immersive exhibition “Wall of Memories”.

Arabic with English subtitles.

🕓 Approximately 60 minutes

No break

ECHOES OF THE NORTH: THE UNSPOKEN MEMORY

Written, Directed & Produced by

Omar Khaled

A SpotCast Production

Director of Photography / Cinematography

Saad Matar

Edited by

Saad Matar

Assistant Director

Saad Matar — AnaHon Production

Additional Camera

Assem Nayrab

Graphics & Titles

Hadi Sabbagh

CONCEPT RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Hisham Dalati

Mohamad Obeid

Abdlrahman Khaled

FEATURING

16 witnesses across two geographies:

Tripoli

Abdul Nasser Yassin

Ridwan Yassin

Bassem Assaf

Dr. Ziad Ajaj

Idi al-Masri

Nazeeh Qamar al-Din

Nasser Darwish

The Qutb Brothers (Abu Omar & Abu Mohammad)

Jean Ratl

Abu Khaled

Kanaan Naji

Abu Ayman

Muin al-Murabbi

Akkar

Dr. Abdul Karim Habblas (Berkayel)

Osama al-Asmar / son of Abu Nafez (Berkayel)

Dr. Fouad Kafrouni (Tel Abbas)

WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF

Beirut Heritage Initiative

ARCHIVAL MATERIAL

Australian War Memorial

Wikimedia Commons

Getty Images

Magnum Photos / Eli Reed

Arab Image Foundation

British Pathé / Reuters

INA France — Institut National de l'Audiovisuel

Blinken OSA — Open Society Archives / CEU Budapest

AP Archive

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Production Country

Lebanon

Filming Location

Tripoli, Lebanon

Production Year

2026

CO-FUNDED BY

The European Union

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

Samir Kassir Foundation

PRESENTED AT

Beirut Spring Festival 2026

© 2026 SpotCast. All rights reserved.

Metropolis Cinema

Indoors venue

Capacity: 200 seats

Phone Number: +961.1.202.422

Directions via Google Maps ↱

Parking available for free / street parking / parking available for a fee

Beit El Fann / Azm Cultural Center

Indoors venue

Capacity: 200 seats

Phone Number: +961.3.387.714

Directions via Google Maps ↱

Parking available for free / street parking / parking available for a fee