Ziād al-Raḥbānī’s Fīlm Amīrkī ṭawīl The mental asylum as political metaphor

Ziād al-Raḥbānī’s popular theater, which is intertwined with the political crises that have shaken Lebanon since the 1960s, denounces the dysfunctionality of the Lebanese political system and a mass culture in the service of apparatuses of control. The play Fīlm Amīrkī ṭawīl (1980), influenced by the antipsychiatry trend, makes use of the notion of the asylum in order to reveal the workings of a power whose manipulative intent is to train the patient to adapt to an unacceptable reality.