With the Beirut Film Center and Solo Films, we are developing a feature documentary with the ethics of veganism at its heart.
Twice a year, migratory birds cross the mountains of Lebanon, and men are waiting for them with guns. For many of these men, hunting is something handed down from fathers and uncles, tied to strength and to what it means to be a man. In many communities a boy proves himself by drawing blood; it earns him respect, and it makes him marriageable. Men of the Blood asks what that tradition costs the birds, the land and the men themselves, at a time when a changing climate is already making the birds’ journey harder.
The film follows Chadi Saad, a storyteller and a former hunter who now manages the SPNL Hima Hammana Raptor Observatory. His change is not a simple redemption story. It is a man unlearning what he was taught, and finding a way of being a man built on protecting rather than killing.
Through conversations with hunters, conservationists and the families around them, and through the old Lebanese figure of the hakawati, the storyteller, the film treats masculinity as an environmental question as much as a social one. It does not set out to condemn anyone. It sets out to understand, and to ask whether a cycle built on blood can be broken.
