In her documentary And the Fish Fly Above Our Heads—which had its Cairo premiere last Friday at Zawya cinema, part of the Between Women Filmmakers Caravan—Lebanese filmmaker Dima Al-Horr offers a distinctive, poetic statement. The film might appear simple but it is deeply reflective of Beirut’s collapse and the feelings of the masses since 7 October and, even though it was made in 2025, through the US-Israel war on Iran and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.
In the course of 70 minutes, Al-Horr builds a sense of time’s fragility and worthlessness for Beirut dwellers, focusing on three men: Reda, Adel and Qassem. Reda, who is likely to be in his sixties, walks two hours every day to reach the seashore, a daily routine he has kept up for 20 years, since Al-Horr first met him while making a short film; he was lying on a rock, an image that appears to have been the seed of this film from that moment. Al-Horr follows Reda with her camera as he swims in the sea, reflecting on how his movements are in harmony with the waves. She regards the sea sometimes with love and other times with anger, saying the Mediterranean is cursed, having swallowed 2,500 people attempting to flee into Europe in a single year.
Al-Horr tells many stories in her own voice. In the online discussion held after the screening and moderated by Lebanon Caravan Coordinator Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel with founding director Amal Ramsis – Al-Horr couldn’t leave Beirut due to the present situation – she explained that she wanted to create some distance with specific stories from the past, thus creating levels of time with the more recent stories being told by the protagonists. Reda, for instance, recounts how he lost his younger brother at the start of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s. His eyes shining with joy and grief, he talks about how handsome his brother was. Al-Horr also asks him whether he has experienced a major love story, but his answer is no, he is a shy man who can never take things further than friendship.
Adel works as a cleaner at a hospital, where his life is restricted to a dull daily routine that is filled with action when bombardment takes place in a nearby neighbourhood and injured people start to flock to the hospital. The only thing he loves is his day off, when he goes swimming and leaves all his worries behind. Adel and Reda have been friends for 20 years and enjoy swimming together. This place has become something of a sanctuary for two men who have been stripped of everything; they no longer have anything left to lose.
“As for Reda and Qassem, they are really good friends and they come daily to the sea to swim. When I saw Reda after 20 years still in the same place I felt the urge to make a film about these cinematic characters,” Al-Horr said. “Previously, my work was mainly with women, but that day when I revisited the place and saw Reda, I felt that I wanted to present these male characters. And seeing Reda in the same place made me feel that nothing had changed in his life, except that he’d grown older, so I felt the urge to know what happened in the past 20 years, and we started to tell each other what had happened in our lives and then when I was introduced to Qassem and Adel, they also started telling me about their lives.”
She lamented the fact that Qassem and Reda are constantly there, every day, just sitting and waiting. “They’re waiting for nothing, or I might say they are waiting for time to pass. But the interesting thing is their relationship with Beirut and also my relationship with Beirut and so they talked about their memories in Beirut.” Al-Horr answers one of the audience’s questions about how she penetrated a patriarchal world: “The main factor was to build trust, the fact that they felt that I was respecting them and that we are all equal. This is very important and I think those things can be felt between people, in addition to the fact that, when they found out that I’d already known Reda for 20 years, that gave them a sense of security.”
While Qassem suffers from an old injury in his leg, he is also was one of the survivors of the massive explosion at the Port of Beirut that occurred in 2020. He lives with his brother and his wife’s brother and, due to religion and conservatism, is obliged to leave the house daily from sunrise till sunset until his brother returns from work, in order not to be alone with his sister-in-law. Unlike the other two protagonists, Qassem doesn’t love the sea but he insists on swimming because it is good for his health and the only way to exercise safely due to his leg injury.
The title of the film is something of a mystery until it is explained: Reda used to have a dream that time was going backwards and that the sea was above his head and the sky under his feet. With a voiceover telling that recurrent dream of Reda’s, Al-Horr creates an experimental scene where she tilts the camera to reflect that viewpoint. She accompanies Reda from his house to the shore, counting his footsteps, past the once luxurious Holiday Inn Hotel, a 26-storey building that was witness to destruction during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), where she starts counting the bullet holes. Al-Horr explains her process in this way: “I work alone. I wrote the film alone. I don’t even have an assistant or someone for sound or anything, and this creates intimacy with the people, it’s just me with a camera and they start to feel comfortable with the camera in time. All the characters and I became familiar with each other.”
Al-Horr, a filmmaker and screenwriter, made her debut feature Chaque Jour est une Fête (Everyday is a Holiday) in 2009, featuring Hiam Abbas and Manal Khader. It won a special mention at Carthage Film Festival. She currently teaches documentary filmmaking in France. She previously made a number of short films like Prêt-à-porter Imm Ali (2003), The Street (1997) and Zeinab on the Scooter.
The Between Women Filmmakers’ Caravan is an independent initiative created by Egyptian female filmmakers in 2008. It aims to support women filmmakers by providing alternative screening spaces for their work in the Arab world, Europe, and Latin America.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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