Overview
- The documentary by Dima El Horr, broadcast on France 3, follows a group of men who return daily to Beirut’s corniche to swim as a way to manage personal and collective trauma.
- The film centers on Reda, a longtime regular whose routine the director says has helped him survive decades of violence and loss and who confessed the practice kept him from suicide.
- El Horr returned to the same location roughly twenty years after first filming there and found continuity in the ritual, showing how the habit persisted across decades.
- The director uses a restrained, observational style that focuses on the sea, waves and setting rather than close, face-centered portraits to convey the men’s guarded intimacy.
- The film links private coping to wider crises by invoking Lebanon’s layered economic and political instability and noting heavy Mediterranean migration losses, a connection that may deepen public focus on mental health and humanitarian issues.