Yousry Nasrallah’s 2004 Bab El Shams (Gate of the Sun) was chosen by the Swiss Locarno Film Festival to be restored as part of its Heritage Online program, a Locarno Pro initiative that gives new life to film heritage. The new 4K version of the film will be presented as part of the official selection of the 76th Locarno Film Festival, which takes place next August.

The film follows a Palestinian family who flee the Nakba to a refugee camp in Lebanon. “In the beginning was Palestine,” reads the synopsis, “and the story of Younes began, known as Abou Salem, known as the Man, said to be the father of Ibrahim, fighting the English from the age of 16, still fighting, but retrenched in the Lebanon, illegal in his own country ; the story of Nahila also began, married to him when she was twelve, breast-feeding their first child, born during the villagers’ exhausting trek towards the North, fleeing their burning homes, Nahila whom he met secretly in a cave in Bab El Shams, in Galilee. Again it is the story of Doctor Khalil , abandoned by his mother in the shambles of the refugee camps, who, in Beirut, rescued Younes in a deep coma, lulling him with the tragic story of his people; and yet again it is that of Shams whom Khalil loved and was executed by his companions in arms. Fifty years of history full of suffering, hope and love.”

For many reasons, the restoration of Yousry Nasrallah’s epic is an exceptional and inspiring event. There is, for example, the unfortunate fate facing hundreds of Arab and Egyptian neglected masterpieces due to the lack of a cinematic heritage restoration and preservation institutional  mechanisms  in the Arab world. A few months ago, asked about  Bab El Shams in the course of a TV interview – the Locarno decision had not yet been made – Nasrallah’s reflexive reaction demonstrated the extent of his preoccupation with it. “I am sad!” he said “They don’t  screen it any more.  We don’t know who owns the rights to the film’s negative. We don’t know how to screen it.”  Restoring a film means bringing it back to life, preserving the story and the art of storytelling.

This is why restoring Bab El Shams in particular is a remarkable event. The epic film, which tells the story of half a century of Palestinian history, celebrates the role of storytelling in the survival of identity and memory. The film condenses the history of a people and a land into a script woven from a story within a story, co-written by the director, but also by the iconic Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, whose eponymous novel it is based on. Lebanese director and writer Mohamed Sweid also contributed to the screenplay. However, the novel is originally the product of hundreds of stories that Khoury collected from witnesses of the Nakba and the Palestinian diaspora,  reformulating them into an astonishing literary epic.

An epic is a story that straddles generations, and in the Palestinian case, only storytelling can connect the younger generations to the story of the motherland. In its two parts, The Departure and The Return, the film covers a broad historical expanse, from the Nakba to the exodus of Palestinians from Beirut in 1982, its disparate components bound by storytelling most of all. All the main characters of Bab El Shams tell stories, transmitting memories and history through storytelling.

The individual oral story is a way to confront the collective story, and the dominance of the official narrative. Through the love that binds Younis and Nahila, and through stories of love, hate, death, loss, return that await all the characters in the film, we realise half a century of a country’s history. We learn it through the experience of a group of people who have experienced it, lived it, remembered it, and desperately wanted others to remember it as they saw it. Bab El Shams validates and acknowledges the kind of oral history that is indispensable to the story of Palestine.

There is no doubt that Yousry Nasrallah’s epic has greatly influenced the way in which the Arab screen deals with the image of the hero and the cause. In the personal story, there are no angels and demons, only human beings who can reinvent themselves. And that is what Bab El Shams is about.

On the other hand, the film is widely seen as one of the most prominent Arab films based on a literary work, which is thought-provoking for a film d’auteur filmmaker. Bab El Shams is the fifth feature film directed by Yousry Nasrallah, after four films, three of which he wrote on his own: Summer Thefts (1988), Mercede (1993), and Boys and Girls (1996). Yet the sheer volume of the epic novel, which exceeds 500 pages, and the huge historical stage on which it is played out, makes turning it into a film an arduous process. Nasrallah often spoke of Bab El Shams in the spirit of an auteur, saying that it is  not his attempt to film the novel, but rather to express his own journey with the world and the characters of the novel.

Nevertheless, the way the world of the novel was transferred into the film privileges the stories’ owners. The cast includes some of the most prominent Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian actors: Hiam Abbas, Bassel Khayyat, Fadi Abi Samra, Hussein Abou Seada, Fady Abou-Samra, and Darina Al Joundi. Designed by the renowned Egyptian designer Nahed Nasrallah – Youssry’s sister – the costumes match the context, as do the shooting locations in Syria, Lebanon, and France, the dialect, and the use of folk music.

Nasrallah managed to create a poetic, violent, and poignant historical epic in a calibre of its own. Produced by Humbert Balsan, Bab El Shams initially premiered Out of Competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 June, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly