Industrial Symphony of Life and Death
Taste of Cement (2017, 85'), Ziad Kalthoum
A group of men is standing at a scaffolding platform on a skyscraper in the centre of Beirut. Barely looking at the camera, their eyes are directed towards the other side of the Mediterranean shore. Beautifully shot, but the picture is somehow disturbing. Scaffolding grids mirroring in the men’s eyes look like cage bars.
The same men are descending into the basement at the end of the day. Their only windows to the outside world are their smartphone screens that glare up in the darkness. The buildings they work on are getting taller day by day and they go by the same routine. A sign „No Syrian worker allowed on the streets after 7 PM” brutally reminds us of their isolation.
Ziad Kalthoum dedicates his latest documentary „Taste of cement” to Syrian refugees working on construction sites in Lebanon. Syrian workers have already been present in Lebanon since the 60s and 70s due to local labourers’ shortages and economical problems in their homeland. Their number has varied over the years and started increasing significantly after the acts of violence against protesters in 2011, and the outburst of the Syrian Civil War. Lebanese authorities estimate that there is over a million both legal and illegal Syrian workers in Lebanon currently.
The narrator, an anonymous Syrian worker, is telling a personal story of how his father had worked on a construction site in Lebanon before, and how he, himself, followed his footsteps after outbreak of the civil war. Even though essential and important, his voice is not what makes this film unique.
The film’s strength lies in its composition. Kalthoum creates a structure of ostensibly loose visual and sonic associations inseparably interwoven with each other. Present merges with the past through the image of a shore as we are entering a kitchen in Damascus, where the narrator’s father just arrived back home. Cement poured over the grid is strangely and uncannily soothing: sounds like water, spreads like mud. In his memories, it penetrates every pore in a skin and activates other senses: ‘The taste of cement is eating my thoughts’, the taste of cement evokes the smell of death. Cement shelters people and buries them alive. While scenes from Lebanon are shot in vivid, bright tones and even the cement has its colour, images from Syria are covered in a greyish dust. In the director’s vision, cement becomes a powerful element, comparable to water.
Compelling and poetic shots are juxtaposed with each other and pointing out the sad irony of the workers’ situation. While they build skyscrapers in Beirut, their houses in Damascus or Aleppo are turning into ruins. Kalthoum skilfully uses different sources to show it. He incorporates footage from Syrian news reports, as well as fragments of a promotional video clip of Russian tank. Colourful and precisely composed images captured by Talal Khoursy are in contrast with first-person-shooter-video-game-like shots taken by a camera installed in front of a Russian tank and authentic video-recordings documenting rescue action after bombing.
The composition of „Taste of Cement” follows the logic of trauma, repeating itself and connecting seemingly unrelated phenomena. The director points out that workers are stuck in an everlasting loop, imprisoned in their perpetual state of legal limbo. Traumatic memories can be triggered any time, which has been masterfully emphasized by the soundtrack composed by Sebastian Tech. Thuds of hammers, buzzing drills, engines of unidentified machines form the worker’s everyday soundscape. The sounds of ordinary life: hums of street traffic or a gentle swoosh of waves barely manage to break through this wall of noise. This industrial symphony often opens doors to the memories of war. While the camera slowly moves over the suburban landscape we start hearing rock crushing crane drills sounding like machine guns. A strike of thunder recalls the blast of a bomb. The noise of a drill in the wall takes the narrator back to the moment, when he was rescued from the rubbles of a destroyed building in Damascus.
Kalthoum refrains from interviewing his protagonists in front of the camera. As he mentioned during the discussion after his film’s Berlin premiere in Kino Moviemento, such a step might endanger the workers or their families. The narrator’s voice tells the story of one of the construction workers. Through this gesture, the personal memory may become the universal experience of Syrian workers in exile. Could this experience be altered? The film ends with the image of a cement mixer driving through Beirut, and the city is sucked into its vortex while it is rotating. Ultimately, the vehicle is driving into a tunnel. Where is it heading? Would the cycle of workers’ experiences repeat themselves again or may there be a way out? I’m leaving the cinema with an impression of hope.
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