Holding The Line

An extraordinary portrait of ordinary citizens at war.

Filmmaker's view

In the summer of 2011, I travelled to the besieged Libyan city of Misrata and spent three weeks living with a group of Libyan rebel fighters on the Dafniya frontline outside town.

Holding the Line is the result, a snapshot of the lives of citizen soldiers and medics as they live day and night under loyalist artillery fire defending the place they grew up in.

As well as documenting life on the frontline, the film also attempts to explore the disconnect between the 'real' experience of war and the way it is so often portrayed. This theme was especially pertinent in Libya because the fighters were ordinary people with no military training, whose only preconceptions of war came from the media, computer games and Hollywood films.
In the West, we are constantly bombarded by representations of conflict. However, so often the people who create and disseminate these images have no experience of war, or are in some way using its associated values to sell something. Like sex, war sells.
Those of us in the media who document war are not immune from interpreting it through the same illusory framework of understanding, also partly because it is a formula that reliably sells the story to our editors or to the public. When we go to a warzone, we therefore find ourselves imposing this long-accepted way of seeing and relating onto what we experience.