Experiencing Interruptions?

The Combatant

"The Combatant," an animated documentary short, tells the true story of a Lebanese Shi’ite boy transfixed by American action movies who is lured into combat by Hezbollah during its entry into the Syrian civil war. The fables he was told about the thrill of combat turn into bitter reality on the battlefield. He undergoes a profound change of heart and mind that leads him to an improbable new life.

The voice you hear is from an interview we filmed with the former fighter himself. In lieu of the video footage, we employed striking digital animation, both to protect him from retribution and provide a compelling experience of his story.

  • Joseph Braude
    Director
  • Joseph Braude
    Writer
  • Joseph Braude
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes 57 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 14, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    Lebanon
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Joseph Braude

Joseph Braude, president of the Center for Peace Communications, studied Near Eastern languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. He developed his Arabic to broadcast quality over a seven-year stint on Moroccan national radio and added Persian to his Arabic and Hebrew as a graduate student at the University of Tehran.

He is the author of "The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World" (Random House, 2011); "Broadcasting Change: Arabic Media as a Catalyst for Liberalism" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); and "Reclamation: A Cultural Policy for Arab-Israeli Partnership" (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2019),

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Hezbollah does not want the world to hear the voices of the millions of Arabs in Lebanon and Syria who want a different future, free of its domination. We created this unusual documentary short in order to lend a platform to one of them, using digital animation to protect his identity and provide a creative representation of his life story accompanying his actual recorded voice.