The Lebanese Rocket Society

The Lebanese Rocket Society

Image by The Lebanese Rocket Society

Daniel Nelson

 

Science fact is stranger than science fiction in The Lebanese Rocket Society, a documentary about Lebanon’s space programme

If you didn’t know Lebanon had a rocket and space programme, you are not alone: virtually no Lebanese know about it either.

The two directors, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, film themselves making a radio appeal to listeners to a phone-in radio programme with memories of rocket launches, of reading about the flights in the press, of what they felt about the rocket programme at the time. The film-makers got zero response.

The rocket programme started in the 1960s when Manoug Manougian, a Lebanese Armenian maths lecturer at Haigazian University and a group of students set out to make their own rockets. Their work took off, the rockets got bigger and more powerful, TV, radio and the press covered the launches. There was pride in Lebanon becoming  the Arab world’s first rocket-maker.

Then, suddenly, silence. Work was halted, everyone forgot about it. Societal amnesia.

Hadjithomas and Joreige track down Manougian and the former army officer who had got involved with him in the project because the researchers needed military help to secure the raw materials for rocket fuel. The two pioneers say rocket development stopped because of pressure from, or through, France.

Manougian, who now lives in the US but has an archive that charts the entire project, insists the work was purely scientific; his colleague says that of course the military had other aims.

The opening segment of the documentary is conventional – pedestrian – in the way it sets out this forgotten slice of history, brightened only by shots of bands of men, including increasing numbers in uniform, assembling ever bigger rockets and watching them plume into the sky.

It brightens up with the film-makers’ theory that the idea of making rockets came at a time when the Arab world dared to dream and enthusiasm and exhilaration were in the air. They decide to add their own imaginative dimension by creating a sculpture of one of the rockets and presenting it to the university.

The factory owner is nervous about the potential for trouble when it is discovered that a full-size rocket is being made –even if it’s not real – and pulled through the streets. So begins a round of visits to officials high and low, to secure the permissions and clearances.  The making of the sculpture is matched by a much jauntier air for the film.

And in a final animated sequence we are offered a computer-generated impression of what Lebanon might have been like had the rocketry work continued – a utopia based on a leading role in the space race and modern technology – “pursuing the dream in the present and saying aloud that we once were researchers and utopians, than once we dreamed and that we can become dreamers again”. It’s an odd and unexpected flourish, but no odder than the way the rocket project took off and then disappeared.

 

·         The Lebanese Rocket Society is released on 18 October

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