I was born and raised in Tripoli. It is my hometown, the city that shaped my sensibility, my contradictions, and my way of inhabiting the world. My desire to make THE DAY OF WRATH: TALES FROM TRIPOLI emerges first from love for this city and its people, but also from an urgency to confront the weight of history that permeates everyday life. This film is an attempt at introspection into my personal history while simultaneously reflecting on the collective trajectories that have defined Tripoli and many Arab cities like it.
Tripoli is a city suspended in hesitation. Its identity has never stabilized into a single narrative, and this instability has marked it deeply. Over decades, the city has undergone consecutive ideological transformations, from Arab nationalism and pan-Arab dreams, to disillusionment and defeat and the rise of radical Islamism, and more recently to revolutionary attempts and their oppressive failure. Rather than resolving its contradictions, each phase has layered new tensions onto the previous ones. This unresolved complexity has contributed both to the marginalization of Tripoli and to its symbolic centrality as a city that reflects the postcolonial malaise of the Arab world.
These questions are not abstract for me. They are embedded in my family history.
THE DAY OF WRATH asks what mechanisms we use to appropriate the past and reconcile with it. How do dominant historical narratives shape our present and limit our imagination of the future? What is the nature of the revolutionary moment, and what traces does it leave on individuals and communities once it fails or is interrupted?
These questions are not abstract for me. They are embedded in my family history. My grandfather, Nadim, was a poet who opposed the French occupation of Lebanon and wrote against colonial domination. His resistance belonged to a generation that believed history could be shaped through language, struggle, and collective imagination. My father raised me with a strong consciousness of Arab identity; he was deeply influenced by the ideals of pan-Arabism and by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Yet he also belonged to a generation marked by exhaustion and defeat after 1967, carrying the emotional and political consequences of a broken promise.
On my mother’s side, I witnessed another transformation: the gradual turn of parts of my family towards radical Islamism, a shift that created profound alienation for me and revealed how ideological frameworks can both offer belonging and impose rupture. These intimate histories mirror the broader ideological oscillations of Tripoli itself. They shaped my awareness of how identity is constructed, fractured, and inherited, often through forces beyond individual choice.
In 2019, I took part in a revolution that sought to challenge Lebanon’s political system. The uprising was brief, and brutally suppressed, leaving behind a sense of paralysis, especially in Tripoli, which was already suffering from deep economic and social marginalization. The failure of this revolutionary moment intensified a feeling that many of us share today: the sensation of being trapped between a past that weighs heavily on us and a future that feels inaccessible. We live under the pressure of rigid historical discourses, inherited identities, and unfulfilled promises.
THE DAY OF WRATH: TALES FROM TRIPOLI is therefore not only a portrait of a city but an attempt to reinterpret history through lived experience. It questions how history is constructed, transmitted, and embodied. It also reflects on cinema itself as a medium capable of engaging with these questions. How do we reconstruct a historical event in film? Is it through fiction, documentary, or the unstable space between them? I am interested in hybridity not as a stylistic choice but as an ethical and political necessity.
Tripoli cannot be reduced to a site of violence or religious extremism. It is also a place of endurance, tenderness, humour, and creativity. The film seeks to hold these dimensions together without resolving them, acknowledging the city’s vulnerability alongside its resilience. An essential question runs through the film, one that feels particularly urgent in Lebanon today: What kind of cinema can emerge from a country in total collapse?
When institutions disintegrate, archives are inaccessible or manipulated, and collective narratives are fractured, cinema becomes a fragile yet vital space for rearticulation. Making films under such conditions requires inventing new forms of production, collaboration, and storytelling. It also requires confronting the limits of cinema itself, its inability to offer solutions, and its potential to open spaces for reflection, affect, and shared experience.
The historical trajectory of Tripoli resonates with that of many Arab cities. From the anti-colonial struggles of the 1940s to the dreams of pan-Arabism in the 1950s, from the disillusionment of the 1960s to the rise of political Islam in the 1980s, and finally to the revolutionary attempts of the past decade, these shifts reflect a broader regional history marked by repetition, interruption, and unresolved trauma.
Yet despite the darkness of the present moment tainted with the catastrophic genocide on Gaza, there persists a desire for change, for imagining other ways of being in the Arab world. This desire may no longer take the form of grand ideologies, but it survives in gestures, voices, and collective acts of refusal. At its core, THE DAY OF WRATH: TALES FROM TRIPOLI asks what the nature of our relationship to our cities truly is.
The film proposes a visceral reinterpretation of history as a way to restore trust in the future.
How can we reclaim agency over spaces that feel increasingly hostile or alienating? For years, many of us have lived with a sense of estrangement from our urban environments, traumatised by the past and deprived of a meaningful role in shaping the present. The film proposes a visceral reinterpretation of history as a way to restore trust in the future.
By revisiting fragments of the past through bodies, voices, and images, it seeks to reclaim the right to narrate our own stories and, in doing so, to reimagine our relationship to the cities we inhabit. This film is not an answer but an attempt. An attempt to listen, to collect, to assemble, and to feel. It is an invitation to remain with uncertainty, to inhabit the in-between spaces where history, memory, and desire collide. Through this process, THE DAY OF WRATH hopes to open a space where the past can be reactivated not as a burden, but as a site of possibility.
Rania Rafei
