Song of All Ends

Song of All Ends gently leads us into the daily life of a family living in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, sixteen months after the dreadful port explosion. With slow determination the atmosphere builds through intriguing, as-yet unconnected, images in stark black-and-white – the face of a young girl, a teddy bear, rags flapping in the breeze, roofs strewn with rubble and tarpaulins. Water streams everywhere and skeletal buildings are set against a grey sky littered with clouds. There is mystery here, and a sense of great sadness. Life seems suspended; small, objectively productive tasks – calisthenic exercises, lugging tyres, feeding a small flock of chickens – seem pointless, merely to fill time. All at once, in a brief flash of colour, we come to understand the heart-rending tragedy that has paralysed this family and we begin to share with them the burden of sorrow that blurs the path forward. Filmmaker Giovanni C. Lorusso has meticulously crafted a rare work, one that universalises and makes palpable the singular experience of a family’s struggle to heal itself. In a world that is increasingly frightening in the violent thrusts of its divisiveness Song of All Ends is both powerful filmmaking and viewing. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)