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A series of flashbacks soon reveal her history with Avi: He killed her son and husband years earlier, and she repaid him with a slash on his cheek, now a deep scar.
As Avi orders up more shelling, the casualties mount. A drone strike kills a man carrying medicine. After visiting his pregnant wife in an underground bunker, a leading fighter is surrounded by Israeli soldiers but detonates a hand grenade to kill himself and the Israelis instead of being taken prisoner.
Then the tide turns: Avi is addressing Israeli soldiers as a number of the nearly 4,000 rockets that Hezbollah fired during the war fly overhead.
In Beirut's Abraj theater during a recent screening, most of the 150 spectators burst into applause.
In the next scenes, roadside bombs and shoulder-fired missiles destroy Israeli tanks; village fighters rout an Israeli advance, sending terrified soldiers fleeing; and Umm Abbas emerges from a building with a sniper rifle as Avi falls dead in the street -- all to huge applause.
The cheering continues when a baby is heard crying in the bunker -- until the camera reveals its dead mother.
But the village celebrates anyway, and the credits roll as families return to their homes.
Not all Lebanese like the film. Some reviewers criticized the script as too simple. Bassem Alhakim lauded its special effects, but faulted it for reducing the Israeli colonel's war aims to a personal vendetta.
"In the film, he did not come to carry out an Israeli plan to destroy Hezbollah and disband the resistance," he wrote in the Al-Akhbar newspaper.
The audience at Abraj, however, was pleased.
Abu Asim Bazzeh, who brought his wife and three sons, aged 5, 12 and 14, praised the film's message.
"What really impressed me was the determination of the resistance to hang on to their land and be victorious, because that is what happened," he said.
When asked about his favorite part, his son Mahdi, 12, said, "the missiles."
The theater's manager, Raymond Chaanine, said the film had outsold everything else since it opened and that most who see it are Hezbollah supporters. He had not seen it, adding that not everyone wants to remember the war.
"It's all about taste," he said. "There are some Lebanese who don't want to see anything that has to do with war. Others love it."
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Online: http://www.33daysmovie.com/
[Associated
Press;
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