In Whose Name? The Global Guilt Trip You Can’t Stream on Netflix
“In Whose Name?”—three polite words that, when strung together, form a question no government, corporation, or streaming algorithm wants to answer honestly. The film, by Syrian-French director Ziad Kalthoum, opens with a slow pan across Beirut’s port, still mangled after the 2020 ammonium-nitrate fireworks show that vaporised half the city. From there it spirals outward like shrapnel, ricocheting from refugee tents in northern Lebanon to Berlin’s glass-walled NGOs to a Qatari skyscraper where the air-conditioning is set low enough to keep guilt from spoiling. The title card appears, white on black, as if to remind us that every grand crusade is ultimately a receipt made out to someone else.
Global audiences have been trained—much like lab rats who’ve learned to expect either cheese or an electric shock—to interpret Middle Eastern documentaries as either trauma porn or TED Talks with better cinematography. “In Whose Name?” refuses both genres. Instead, it offers a sardonic travelogue of competing brands of salvation: Gulf charities that stamp their logos on sacks of rice like influencers on handbags; EU border guards who quote Hannah Arendt while confiscating SIM cards; and, for comic relief, a Norwegian peace-studies grad who insists on pronouncing “Hezbollah” as though it were a trendy yogurt. The joke, Kalthoum implies, is that everyone knows the house is on fire; they’re just haggling over who gets to hold the extinguisher for the photo op.
Watching the film in different capitals reveals how context warps meaning. In Washington, viewers nod solemnly at the indictment of “regional power vacuums,” careful never to glance at the Pentagon-shaped elephant in the room. In Ankara, state broadcasters trimmed seven minutes—coincidentally the segment where Turkish drones make a cameo. Meanwhile, Netflix Middle East quietly passed, citing “brand-fit concerns,” a euphemism meaning “our Riyadh office would prefer fewer explosions this quarter.” The censorship montage practically edits itself; one suspects Kalthoum included it as a bonus feature in his head.
What gives the documentary its cross-continental sting is its refusal to pick a single villain. Instead, it distributes culpability the way airlines distribute tiny packets of pretzels—everyone gets a handful, no one leaves nourished. We see Lebanese contractors siphoning reconstruction funds into offshore accounts, then cut to EU taxpayers sighing at headlines about “corruption in the South” while sipping three-euro lattes. The film’s most withering sequence intercuts a Berlin gala auctioning off “future Syrian art” with actual Syrians outside queuing for food parcels. The message isn’t subtle, but then again neither is selling a Banksy knockoff to fund “empowerment workshops.”
By the time the credits roll, the viewer is left holding a hot potato of complicity. The film’s final shot—a drone ascending over the port until the crater looks like a bullet hole in the planet—feels less like closure and more like a dare: try explaining this away with your usual hashtags. In Seoul, a friend texted me that the scene reminded her of the Sewol ferry disaster; in Rio, a colleague saw echoes of the National Museum fire. The specifics change, the pyrotechnics vary, but the fine print on the invoice remains stubbornly the same: payable by whoever is too poor or too powerless to forward the bill.
Which brings us back to the title. “In Whose Name?” sounds almost quaint, like a 19th-century parliamentary inquiry. Yet in an era when every missile launch is live-tweeted with a bespoke emoji, the question feels almost naïvely direct. The film’s uncomfortable achievement is reminding us that behind every geopolitical chess move is an actual pawn—usually on fire, occasionally on camera. And until we can answer that question without checking our donor list first, the credits will keep rolling on an endless loop, subtitled in every language except accountability.
