Art around us: A State of Passion and the six acts of storytelling

At the Cairo International Film Festival, we watched Carol Mansour’s documentary, A State of Passion, which follows Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah in and out of Gaza. Mansour brings us a classic documentary form that does not try too hard to experiment with the genre. She is confident, relying instead on good storytelling.

What are your ingredients for good storytelling?

For us, it’s the details. It’s a feeling that a story keeps unfolding in ways beyond our prediction, with entwined plots and sub-plots that index complexity. It is not a love for complexity per se that we are after, but rather the acknowledgment of an image of our multi-layered lives, alongside creases of beauty and humor in the darkest spaces. After all, film is a magnetic field that takes us outside of ourselves, but it is also a dance that swirls back into our interior. You come out of a movie theater wondering: What just happened? How does this film touch me? How does it add or subtract from my life story? We left the theater with these questions after watching A State of Passion.

The film opens with a compelling introduction to Abu-Sittah’s unique expertise in cosmetic surgery, which gained him recognition for performing scarless lip lift operations — an achievement that defined his online presence until October 2023. Since then, the British Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon has become an icon of resistance against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. He spent 43 days treating the injured in the strip’s embattled hospitals.

Abu-Sittah wouldn’t shy away from sharing with us that his father, a pediatrician, thinks that plastic surgery is pimp medicine. He spoke of struggling with meaning, again, not shying away from calling cosmetic surgery the nightmare that would follow him to Gaza before the genocide when a woman he operated on found him there to tell him she didn’t like her nose job. Telling a story becomes an act of confession. 

From plastic surgery, Abu-Sittah moves on to untangling plastic rags off of children’s bodies, removing countless shrapnel and fragments from their thighs, and amputating their limbs. There are too many of them. At one point, he realized that some of these children had lost everyone in their family. Children were all alone on the hospital floors and beds.

And then we intermittently watch the horrid imagery from Gaza, the televised genocide we have grown too accustomed to have in our everyday lives. This movement between holistic images of destruction and Abu-Sittah’s personal account reminds us that no matter how much we know a story too well in its entirety, how it is experienced gives it its true meaning and life. Abu-Sittah was often keen to remind us that before so much death, there were indexes of an ordinary life that were not meant to be, like the nail polish on girls’ fingertips.

There is a delicacy and humanity in handling death and caring for mortal remains despite the massive death toll in Gaza. Abu-Sittah spoke of a little cemetery set for children’s amputated arms and legs. Each amputated limp was laid to rest in a box that had the name of the child it belonged to before it was inhumed. A story like this might be a pathway to philosophy, for it opens up questions of ways in which the living begins to outlive the dead. 

A story is also political when we tell it through our subject positions. Abu-Sittah speaks of the cheap polyester clothing of the people in Gaza that caught fire quickly and turned around bodies, burning them to death. It was his way to speak of the destitution of the oppressed, to speak for the violence of poverty and destitution in all this monstrosity. 

And it’s also about fugitive imagination. We see Abu Sittah driving through the streets of Kuwait City, where he grew up, pointing to the location of his childhood home and finally standing in front of his father's clinic. “Shouldn’t I have gone to the training camp in Eden?” As a young man, Abu-Sittah remembers one day telling his father he wanted to go to Eden for a training camp. “One day, people would point their index finger in your direction and say this is Ghassan Abu-Sittah,” his father replied, enticing him to focus on studying medicine. We stopped momentarily to imagine the other possible life he could have lived had he gone to Eden.

Abu-Sittah’s body is hunched a little; you can tell from how he walks on camera. He speaks of moving on through some sort of forward momentum. We look up “forward momentum” in the dictionary: "If a process or movement gains momentum, it keeps developing or happening more quickly and keeps becoming less likely to stop." This is how Abu Sittah moves, how the film moves, and how the struggle against injustice through this story and many others continues. We like the old idea that stories are told to leave us with something, a morale or so.

Mansour and her co-director, Muna Khalidi, won the Saad Eddin Wahba award for best film at the festival, as well as the Palestinian Film Competition award and the festival’s Special Jury Award for Best Long Documentary. The film is made through communitarian effort, giving more weight to its title. We wish that all states were states of passion, it’s the one state of solution.