Incendies (Scorched) is the title of the critically acclaimed 2010 film by Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. The film is based on a play of the same title written by Wajdi Mouawad, who since his immigration to Quebec in 1983 from Lebanon—via France—has risen to the top of the Canadian theatre scene. This paper focuses on the film, which more than 20 years after the end of the Lebanese civil war, sends two Quebecois siblings, Simon and Jeanne Marwan, on a quest to the Middle East that is simultaneously a reconstruction of their mother’s brutal personal past and a meditation on the meaning of civil war. While the film seeks to move beyond the particulars of Lebanon by setting the events in a fictional Middle Eastern country symbolically named Fuad, there is no mistaking it for any place but Lebanon; the main city of Daresh is clearly Beirut and the prison in the South where the mother is detained closely resembles the notorious Khiam prison run by Israel’s army of occupation and the South Lebanese Army. The protagonist, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), who assassinates a Christian right wing militia leader, is in part based on the true story of Souha Bechara who attempted to shoot General Antoine Lahad of the SLA. This paper begins by cataloguing correspondences between Lebanon’s history and civil war references in the film, and then it moves beyond the obvious parallels to explore how the fiction of the narrative, which weaves familial intimacies around political intrigue, is undercut by the verisimilitude that characterizes the imagery of the civil war. In the final section of the paper, I critically engage the affective quality of the film, its ability to draw the viewer into the drama of self-discovery as it is experienced by Simon and Jeanne (the twins) and to achieve a neat resolution of the past as they deliver the letters of the dead mother to their "estranged" Middle Eastern father and brother. The upshot of this analysis of the film is to show how Incendies complicates representations of war in the Middle East even as it seemingly reproduces the myth that the nightmare of violence over there (Fuad/Lebanon) stands in contrast to the banal reality of here (Montreal).