“It was everything: kidnapping people, shelling civilian quarters, bombs, torturing, electrical shots, killing in the streets or killing in the prisons. And I did not think that what I was doing was bad.”

– Testimony of a perpetrator of crimes featured in ‘Lebanon’s Missing‘, a film by Dalia Khamissy

When Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit came across Dalia Khamissy‘s work from Lebanon, he was hooked and worked to present her work as a radio documentary combining Khamissy’s commentary with her photographs and film footage.

Ben hopes it will be the first of many such collaborations/presentations with the BBC World Service.

In my email inbox, from Ben:

Today, [Lebanon’s Missing] the first documentary and photofilm was published. It will be played worldwide seven times on the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4.

It’s about the estimated 17,000 people kidnapped during the Lebanese civil war and never seen again. It’s a genuinely brilliant presentation by Dalia, with some great photos and video for the film (which is really meant as a teaser for the documentary).

Few know about the Missing in Lebanon, which is why I think it’s an important story to be heard. Not because the broadcast will change anything dramatically but because memory is resistance against the same atrocities being repeated.

Please take five minutes to watch the film and, if it moves you, download the podcast of the documentary. Dalia deserves enormous respect for this work. It was a brave story for her to take on.

Hopefully, the BBC will commission more programs of this nature, which would be great for photographers working on important stories who would like to reach a genuinely large audience.

I hope so too Ben, and I hope the duck magic becomes a permanent fixture on the World Service wires.

FURTHER READING

Conscientious: A Conversation with Dalia Khamissy