In the 1860s, Lebanese fighter Youssef Bey Karam led a rebellion against Ottoman rule and was driven into exile first to Algeria, then to Naples, where he spent his remaining years writing in defense of Lebanese sovereignty. His archive is the departure point for a film that reaches backward to ask what forces produced today's collapse in Lebanon.

The filmmaker's grandfather served as a troop commander in South Lebanon for 25 years, binding the inquiry into sovereignty to a personal and familial entanglement with the region's long militarization. Casting ordinary citizens in its reconstruction of this history, the film puts the idea of the nation-state to a popular test: what does it mean, who does it serve, and what remains of it when it fails? Moving between documentary and fiction, it opens a conversation that goes beyond Lebanon into the wider Arab world and its unfinished histories of self-determination.

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