Lebanon’s first all-female thrash metal band battle against a society that routinely ignores, dismisses or demonises them in Rita Baghdadi’s engaging, ear-bashing documentary Sirens. Screening in Munich Film Festival this week, this charmingly offbeat rock-doc is much more than a niche subculture snapshot for heavy rock fans, touching on themes of generational conflict, gender politics, freedom of expression and forbidden LGBT love. Aptly enough, Baghdadi made this feminist-slanted project with an almost entirely female crew, including big-name executive producer credits for Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph. Which suggests Sirens will find plenty of industry champions and potential release platforms once its prize-winning festival run is over, and deservedly so.
On the surface, Sirens is a small, intimate, fly-on-the-wall portrait of Slave to Sirens, five young women who just want to rock. The band’s two guitar players, and biggest alpha-female egos, are Shery Bechara and Lilas Mayassi. Outspoken, politically engaged rebels who share an intense personal chemistry, they call the shots and write most of the songs. The other members fade into the wallpaper when these two are on screen, partly because Baghdadi never allows the remaining trio – growling vocalist Maya Khairallah, bass guitarist Alma Doumani and drummer Tatyana Boughaba – much time in the spotlight. Like most rock groups, Slave to Sirens is clearly not an egalitarian democracy, and nor is this film. The band function more like a benign dictatorship, with the charismatic hot-head Mayassi emphatically in charge.
But as it unfolds, Sirens shifts from a music-driven documentary into more of a queer love story. Complicating routine band tensions, it emerges that Mayassi and Bechara are ex-lovers, their romantic history serving as both a strong creative bond and volatile source of friction. Although they are now separated and cautiously pursuing other partners, usually via awkward online assignations that can be safely hidden from friends and families, both still appear to have tender feelings for each other. A beautifully shot sequence of them swimming in the Mediterranean together has a lyrical, gently erotic glow.
Sirens is a bittersweet, coming-of-age study of female love and friendship. But it is also a chronicle of minor victories, and small defeats, in the global forever war against patriarchy and misogyny. While Lebanon is one of the most liberal, cosmopolitan societies in the Middle East, it also has a long history of deep-seated religious conservatism and youth-culture censorship, including bans on heavy rock albums. As young women who play thrash metal and dress in wild headbanger gear, Slave to Sirens face an everyday pushback of parental and social disapproval, with strangers attacking them online as “sluts” and “Satanists”.
Adding extra bite to this sense of alienation for Mayassi and Bechara is their queerness, which friends and family seem to scarcely acknowledge. Mayassi’s mother dances delicately around the elephant in the room, still steering her daughter towards the ideal of traditional marriage and children. Their shared scenes are some of the best in the film, charged with prickly generational friction and unspoken questions to which both already know the answers. If the band’s families really did not know the truth before, they will after seeing Sirens.
In the midst of these mounting personal tensions, Baghdadi brings in a wider political dimension when the Port of Beirut is rocked by a giant explosion in August 2020 after a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate catches fire, killing at least 218 people. As narrative shading, these events have a symbolic weight, although the director’s attempts to somehow link the blast to tensions between the band member feels a little tenuous. “We inherited some kind of trauma from our parents, I wasn’t aware of it until this explosion,” claims Mayassi. “Home doesn’t feel, safe friendship doesn’t feel safe, love doesn’t feel safe.” This is a nicely poetic line, but a little glib. Baghdadi dedicates Sirens to the victims of the explosion.
As an exercise in documentary reportage, Sirens is a little too scrappy, leaving too much unexplained and unresolved. As noted above, the other three band members are treated as mere supporting players in the main psychodrama between Mayassi and Bechara. Baghdadi also makes a few odd stylistic decisions, like soundtracking a Slave to Sirens photo shoot sequence with jaunty Europop instead of the band’s own hard-rocking music. An invitation to Britain to play two major music festivals, Gllastonbury and Boomtown, becomes an enjoyably chaotic Spinal Tap-level farce that could easily have filled more screen time.
But for all is flighty, elusive nature, Sirens is mostly an inspirational and big-hearted film about a group of charming, complex, quietly courageous young women. With Slave to Sirens reportedly planning to release their debut album this year, Baghdadi’s film now feels like their opening chapter, their audio-visual demo tape, a promising stepping stone to greater things.
Venue: Munich Film Festival
Director, cinematography: Rita Baghdadi
Producers: Rita Baghdadi, Camilla Hall
Executive Producers: Danielle Renfrew Behrens, Natasha Lyonne, Maya Rudolph, Cindy Holland, John Boccardo, Derek Esplin, Kathryn Everett, Bryn Mooser, Dave Pell
Editing: Grace Zahrah
Music: Para One
Production companies: Animal Pictures (US), Lady & Bird (US), Endless Eye (US)
World sales: Autolook Filmsales
In English, Arabic
78 minutes
