In The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli, filmmaker Rania Rafei returns to a city that is at oncedeeply personal and profoundly political. Presented at the Berlinale, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through the history of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, tracing decades of upheaval, rebellion, and fragile hope. Beginning with the student protests that helped usher in independence from French rule in 1943, Rafei moves across generations and turning points, revealing how cycles of revolt, disillusionment, and resilience continue to shape the city’s identity.
Blending archival footage, family memories, and contemporary reflection, the film resists the structure of a conventional documentary. Instead, it adopts an open, hybrid form that connects the intimate with the collective, weaving together a cinematic letter to the director’s late father with the wider political and social history of Tripoli. Through voiceover and carefully layered storytelling, history becomes fluid rather than fixed, a living conversation between past and present, personal memory and public narrative.
At the heart of the film lies a question that echoes far beyond Lebanon: how do societies carry unresolved histories, and what happens when collective anger remains unspoken? From the dreams of Pan-Arabism to the fractures of civil war, from economic collapse to the protests that erupted in 2019, The Day of Wrath captures a city caught between confidence and disillusionment, tenderness and fury. Rania Rafei reflects on returning to Tripoli, challenging official narratives, and using cinema as a space where memory, doubt, and political imagination can coexist.
AM: The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli is both a portrait of a city and a meditation on history. What was the initial impulse that led you to return to Tripoli through this cinematic form?
Rania Rafei: The impulse that led me to return had three distinct layers. The first was existential. I was going through a period of questioning my sense of belonging and my origins. For years, I had felt alienated from the city that was once my hometown. That estrangement lingered quietly within me. At forty-one, I sensed that I was finally ready to return, not simply in a physical sense, but inwardly, ready to look at myself more closely by looking at the city. The second layer was a genuine desire to excavate certain historical moments, events that both shaped the city and symbolized its ongoing metamorphosis. It was an attempt to look back in order to leap more consciously into the future. The third layer was the need to confront the collective with the personal, to place the intimate alongside the public, and to allow the two to collide, echo, and question one another.
AM: Your film blends archival material, personal memory, and political reflection. What does this hybrid form allow you to express that a traditional documentary might not?
Rania Rafei: It was a deliberate choice to blend forms and elements while reflecting on themes such as history, memory, nationalism, identity, and revolution. I wanted to challenge the tendency to approach history as a polished, coherent narrative, something fixed, resolved, and authoritative. Instead, I sought to reveal the multiple facets and contradictions through which we think about these complex subjects. I wished to convey their instability, their shifting, almost fragile materiality. History, like identity, is not solid, it is plastic, constantly reconfigured depending on perspective. This fluidity is precisely what connects the individual to the political, the intimate experience of belonging, displacement, revolt, or doubt is never separate from the larger structures that attempt to define it.
To imprison these subjects within a closed, simplified narrative is dangerous. It risks hardening them into dogma. And dogma, when institutionalized, can slide toward authoritarianism, even fascism. I wanted to disrupt that authority, to fracture the voice that claims to tell us definitively who we are, where we come from, and what our history means.
AM: The title The Day of Wrath is powerful and unsettling. What does “wrath” signify for you in the context of Tripoli, anger, resistance, mourning, or something else entirely?
Rania Rafei: Wrath can take many forms. It can trace lines of death, war, violence, annihilation, or it can open lines of life, revolution, rupture, transformation. In its essence, wrath emerges from saturation, something has accumulated for too long, something has overflowed. It demands discharge. It seeks an outlet. In the context of Tripoli, wrath is the anger we remember, anger that once erupted and led to revolt, to shifts in identity, to moments of collective redefinition. Yet it is also the anger that curdled into hatred of the other, into fragmentation and division. Wrath is not inherently emancipatory or destructive, it carries both potentials within it.
On a personal level, I speak of another kind of wrath, the one that remains contained within families, where expression is stifled, where individuals are estranged from their own revolt. It is the quiet anger of those who were never permitted to articulate themselves. It is the wrath I sensed in my father, present, dense, but never allowed to surface or transform. For me, wrath is the shadow, both collective and intimate. It is what remains unspoken, unprocessed, unresolved. And yet it must be confronted and integrated if any genuine movement forward is to occur. But the most important wrath I wanted to evoke in the film is the one that has not yet arrived, the anger still gestating, still searching for the right conditions, the right constellation of elements that would allow it to emerge. It is the wrath that has not yet found its language.
AM: As a filmmaker working between personal memory and collective history, where do you position yourself in the film, as a witness, a participant, or an archivist?
Rania Rafei: This question is essential because it is the very question I was asking myself during the year I made this film, and one I continue to ask. I have not yet found a definitive answer. Perhaps that is why my position within the film kept shifting, at times I was a witness, at others a participant, and at others still an archivist. I was also questioning the place of cinema itself, its importance, its responsibility, and its processes in shaping historical narratives, whether personal or collective. Can cinema document without fixing? Can it participate without dominating? Can it preserve without imprisoning meaning? The instability of my position was not accidental, it was the form the question took.
AM: The film resonates strongly beyond Lebanon, especially in other Arab cities shaped by revolt and disillusionment. Do you see Tripoli as a specific case, or as a mirror of a wider Arab condition?
Rania Rafei: I see Tripoli very much as a mirror of other cities in the Arab world. The processes it has undergone are not isolated, they resonate deeply across the region. Most Arab countries remained under colonial rule well into the twentieth century. Independence, when it came, was often fragile, more a transfer of power than a true rupture. Entire populations were left searching for identity, trying to define themselves in the aftermath of imposed borders and inherited political structures.
The Nakba of Palestine marked a profound rupture for the whole region. It created a collective sense of dispossession and humiliation, reinforcing the feeling that Western powers continued to treat the region as a territory to be controlled rather than as sovereign societies. That wound has never truly healed, it remains embedded in the political and emotional landscape of the Arab world. At the same time, internal dynamics, feudal structures, authoritarian secular regimes, and deep class inequalities, created fertile ground for religious radicalization and civil wars. These were not sudden eruptions but symptoms of unresolved tensions, suppressed political participation, and blocked social mobility. Unfortunately, this reality persists. The dream of transformation that emerged with the Arab Spring in 2011 briefly reopened the horizon of possibility. Yet it collided with entrenched systems of corruption, class struggle, sectarian fragmentation, and external interference. The desire for change was immense, but the structures resisting it were equally powerful.
In this sense, Tripoli’s story is not only its own. It reflects the trajectory of many Arab cities, caught between fragile independence, unresolved histories, revolutionary desire, and the weight of unfinished struggles.
AM: The film was presented in Berlin to an international audience. How do you feel about Middle Eastern stories being received, and sometimes reinterpreted, outside their original context?
Rania Rafei: I have often felt that our part of the world is perceived through a naïve and reductive lens. The complexity of our histories, identities, and internal contradictions is frequently flattened into simplistic narratives that make us easier to categorize, and ultimately easier to dismiss. For me, insisting on complexity is essential. Revealing the layered, fragmented, and sometimes contradictory nature of our stories is not only an aesthetic choice but an ethical one. In a time when global discourse increasingly reduces the “other” in order to dehumanize them, nuance becomes a form of resistance.
Showing the film in Berlin is therefore deeply important to me. It is an opportunity to reclaim the narrative, to propose other ways of telling our stories, beyond cliché, beyond victimhood, beyond exoticism. It is a gesture toward re-establishing dialogue, where complexity is not feared but embraced.
AM: Looking back at the process, was there a moment during the making of the film that changed your own relationship to Tripoli?
Rania Rafei: Many moments during the making of this film, whether in research, filming, or editing, transformed my relationship both to the city and to filmmaking itself. With regard to the city, I encountered parts of it I had never truly seen before. In those overlooked spaces, I discovered beauty, contradiction, and depth. For a long time, I resented the city. I experienced it as hostile, especially as a woman. It felt restrictive, surveilling, limiting. Yet through the process of making this film, I began to perceive it differently, not as a closed and suffocating system, but as a space containing cracks, fissures, and unexpected openings. Within those cracks, I sensed the possibility of emancipation. The city did not change, my way of looking at it did.
This experience also profoundly reshaped my understanding of cinema. It compelled me to rethink how I wish to engage with reality in my future projects. I became more attentive, more patient, more willing to listen. In the process, I grew humbler. I came to understand documentary filmmaking not as a tool to capture or define reality, but as a space of encounter, doubt, and shared vulnerability.