Dania Bdeir | Warsha / 2022

the dazzling joy of being suspended in air over a city which doesn’t want you to exist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dania Bdeir (screenwriter and director) Warsha / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

I fear, hoping I am entirely mistaken, that even younger gay and lesbian viewers may have difficulty viewing Lebanese-Canadian Dania Bdeir’s quite powerful and audacious 2022 short film Warsha, the title referring to a working or construction site.

     The film is made more complex because it features a group of Syrian migrants working in Beirut and high rise construction. They are forced to live in a horrible shared open space with only one small bathroom for their use. Moreover, they speak a different dialect of Arabic than do the Lebanese which make the latter suspicious of their behavior and almost as xenophobic as US citizens seem to have become of all immigrants.

     The lead in this film, Mohammad, is played, moreover, by noted queer singer, dancer, and multi-disciplinary performer, Khansa, beloved by many but also hated by the Beirut conservative religious communities. So startling was his performance in this role, that I immediately watched a number of his videos which I will be sharing with my Queer Cinema audiences in the near future.

 

    Mohammad rises early, sneaking off into the bathroom just for a few seconds of privacy each morning as he lays out a picture of his idol, perhaps the Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum. Or just a vision of himself in drag. But he hardly has a moment to himself before there are a number of knocks and the bathroom door and his almost brutally masculine co-workers demand to be let in so they can rinse themselves off and brush their teeth.

      They are all bussed on to the construction job where they have been hired, a high rise in the middle of Beirut. Even on the way, someone pounds on the window of the bus, cursing the migrant Syrians for even working in Lebanon.

     As they march into their gritty jobs for the day, they overhear the foreman (Mohammad Kamal) desperately calling on the phone for a new crane operator since there as been a serious accident which hurt of perhaps even killed the former worker.

     Before the morning even begins Mohammad contacts the foreman volunteering for the job, since he had previously worked as a crane operator. But this crane is far newer and more complex than any he might have worked on in the past, and besides that the “beast” as the workman call it is taller than most cranes, towering far above the Beirut skyline. Mohammad, nonetheless, signs on and makes the truly terrifying trip up the elevator, across a narrow but long connecting bridge, and climbs rung by rung even higher into the operator's seat so high in the air that it even gives us vertigo. By the time Mohammad has reached the cabin, he is out breath, speechless, unable to even answer the messages on his receiver from below demanding to know of his condition.

     Yet finally, after catching his breath, he turns on an ancient transistor radio from where he hears Kalthoum’s performance of the song-poet by Reyad El Sonbata dn Ibrahim Nagy’s Al Atlal (The Ruins), miming for a few moments before Khansa takes the character off into a truly splendiferous drag performance as he sings, an imaginary version of himself dressed all in red dangling from the teeth of the crane over the city heights.

     This is film at its very best, a true dream of cinematic imagination that Mohammad would never be allowed in his daily life, but separated far from the rest of the world he inhabits in the crane cabin he can imagine for himself, the kind of gender-shifting reality never permitted below. It is so very dazzling that it truly generates a kind of vertigo in the viewer, a spinning world out of this world where dance and the music of the spheres truly dominates reality.

    To ready himself for this role, Bdeir reports in an interview with Mehdi Balamissa in Film Fest Reports, the performer, known for his challenging of notions of male gender masculinity, actually spent a few days under cover as a construction worker.

      As Bdeir comments:

 

“During the preparation [for the film], it was very important to make sure that we were all operating with empathy and trying to experience this same story through different perspectives and not only our own. We organized for Khansa to spend a few days working in a construction site where nobody knew that he was an actor and where he received no special treatment. Khansa entered the male dominated world of Syrian workers and felt the physical & emotional strain, the pressures and the marginalization. He was able to bring this experience into his performance.”

 

      Khansa’s performance is simply astounding, and hard to imagine outside of Toderick Hill’s theatrical extravaganzas.

      Finally, having been released into what Bdeir describes as “space and privacy to break out of gender norms and express himself truly, in a way that he can’t in his daily life,” Mohammed ends the day, congratulated for his operation of the crane.

      He climbs back down those steps and joins the others in the bus back to his squalor with a smile on his face.

      This short was advanced to the shortlist for the 95th Academy Awards as the Best Live Action Short Film, but failed to qualify to the final five nominees.

 

Los Angeles, May 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).