Ten years ago, the movie “Sleepless Nights” (128 d – 2012) by Eliane Raheb was released. Finally, the Lebanese filmmaker revealed that his documentary, which was screened at several festivals including Beirut Film Days, has reached the American streaming platform Netflix and is available to watch, expressing his happiness on social media.

Sleepless Nights is a documentary in which a monk pairs Asaad Al-Shaftari and Maryam Al-Saidi. The first is a former intelligence officer of the Lebanese Armed Forces Party. He participated in the civil war and now seeks to atone for his sins and tell new generations about the dangers of war. As for Maryam Al-Saidi, she is the mother who lost her child, a Communist Party fighter, during the attack on the scientific department of the Lebanese University in the Hadat region in 1982 by “forces”. Two sleepless nights as the tape examines each of their lives, then brings them together in multiple confrontations.

The importance of the work lies in exposing how the Lebanese state closed the case of the civil war after 15 years of fighting by declaring a general amnesty, rejecting selective justice based on loyalty, recounting the facts of the war and opening of mass graves. …
In Sleepless Nights, Elian Raheb combines investigative journalism and post-war cinema to find a missing person case.

*Sleepless Nights is available on Netflix.