Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab, 66, is in Paris to accompany the DVD release of his complete body of work. Since his first feature-length film (Phantom Beirut, 1998), he has cinematized his country's tragedy like one tries, night after night, to wake up from a nightmare. Born in Dakar on May 4, 1958, the author of six meditative feature-length films in his 30-year career was considered, in the wake of the civil war, to be the figurehead of a new Lebanese cinema that never came. At a time when Lebanon, disintegrated and bombed, seems once again to be on the brink of collapse, the solitude of his work shines all the way to us, more than ever, like the black sun of melancholy.

We pretended to believe that this affair was over. We looked ahead, but we made the huge mistake of not also looking behind us, precisely in order to move forward. We're paying the price. In hindsight, this inability to take stock was understandable: We would have had to face up to a bitter truth: that we all lost.

I come from a Muslim family, but I was born in Dakar, Senegal, where my father was a well-known loincloth manufacturer. I spent the first 12 years of my life in this country and was very happy there. When my family returned to Lebanon, I was a stranger. I spoke better Wolof than Lebanese. I'm totally agnostic. That helps, let's say, to take a certain distance from the claim to identity. I even think it saved me. I was soon sent to Paris to pass my high school degree, and I fell in love with the city and discovered cinema. When I returned to Lebanon, I became strongly involved in activism, but for the Palestinian cause.

A very simple thing. Ordinarily, it is nationalism that creates the nation. We have never been a nation. We are the arbitrary result of colonialism and decolonization. The mandatory powers carved us up like slices of saucisson. The nation was supposed to be built on a provisional distribution of power between communities. It was a beautiful utopia to achieve. But we Lebanese never got out of this provisional situation. Quite the contrary.

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