Al-Fayhaa Choir
The brief
Save the Children International wanted a film about the Al Fayhaa Choir in Tripoli. The choir was founded in 2003 and brings together singers from across the city’s communities, running social and youth programmes that use choral singing as a tool for inclusion. The risk with a subject like this is obvious. Films about children and music tend to arrive at the same uplifting place regardless of what actually happened.
Production approach
So we filmed the programme rather than the performance. Fine Line produced the documentary in Tripoli around thirty children, including Syrian refugees and vulnerable members of the Lebanese host community, as they went through a five-month training programme under a dedicated maestro.
Five months is long enough for the interesting part to show up. Learning to sing in a choir is mostly learning to listen to everyone else and hold your own line at the same time, which is a slow and unspectacular thing to acquire. Filming across the programme rather than only at the end of it is what lets that kind of growth register on screen, and it is the only honest way to make the case that something changed.
Outcome
The film builds towards a major performance, but the performance is the deadline rather than the subject. What it records is growth in discipline, leadership and self-expression, and the resilience it took from children who had reason not to show up at all.
At four minutes and forty two seconds it is long enough to sit with the rehearsals. For a choir whose whole method is that inclusion happens through practice rather than proclamation, that felt like the right length.
Client: Save the Children International · Production: Fine Line Production · Tripoli, Lebanon, 2023
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