The Magic of Film
IN A TIME OF DOMESTIC TURMOIL, LEBANON’S FILMMAKERS ARE TAKING THEIR STORIES TO THE WORLD.
There are many reasons to be depressed by the state of Lebanon, but filmmaking is not one of them. Lebanese filmmakers are taking their stories to the world with resounding success. Nadine Labaki, who used advertising and music videos to learn her trade, needs no introduction, of course, and neither does Ziad Doueiri, but dig deeper and you’ll find a wealth of filmmakers making their mark on a regional and global level. Oualid Mouaness’ 1982 has already won awards at the Toronto International Film Festival and the El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt since it premiered in September and is expected to achieve box office success when released next year. Ahmad Ghossein’s All This Victory, which is set during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, has also garnered acclaim since its premiere in August. Young directors such as Jessy Moussallem and Ely Dagher are also making strides. Moussallem, who is probably best known for writing and directing two of Mashrou’ Leila’s most successful music videos, was selected for last year’s new directors’ showcase at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It was the first time that a female director from the region, let alone from Lebanon, had made it into the showcase. “Lebanon has so many stories yet to be told,” says Moussallem, who is signed to the London-based entertainment company Caviar. “It is with this in mind that I am writing my first feature film which will take place in Lebanon. Until now, I had mostly worked on short films where music was put in the foreground. I feel, now, the need to make my characters talk. “We come from a very small part of the
world where not everything is going right,” adds Moussallem, whose films include Damian Lazarus’ Heart of Sky and Embrace for the French music producer Agoria. “And when you have international recognition you start to think that maybe what you’re doing is on the right track. If gives you a push to do more, because you start to think ‘maybe I’m doing the right thing’. I tried a lot of times to move out of Lebanon but I always come back, because there is stuff to talk about. We just have to be more genuine and not try to do something like others. We have to tell our stories.” Dagher, meanwhile, has been relatively quiet since his animated short, Waves ’98, landed the short film Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Part narrative short, part visual essay, at the time of the film’s release it was the first Lebanese film to compete in the official competition since Maroun Baghdadi’s Hors La Vie in 1991. Dagher’s work is centred on disillusionment – “a disease that’s spread across Lebanon and makes people unwilling to take any action or change things” – and he’s taking that disillusionment to the next level. His debut feature, Harvest, is set to start production early next year and is centred on a young woman’s return home to Beirut. The project was awarded $30,000 in film grants from the El Gouna Film Festival in September. “I started writing in 2015 and finished the script about a year-and-a-half ago,” says Dagher, who himself has returned to Beirut after living abroad for a number of years. “Since then we’ve been financing. We needed that tiny bit extra, which we got at El Gouna, so now we’re green lighting the whole thing. It has a lot of the same thematics as Waves, actually. I like to think that the character [in Waves] eventually left for a few years and then had to come back.” Waves ’98 was among five Lebanese shorts screened by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture in Dubai recently. The others included Chadi Aoun’s Silence, Karam Ghossein’s The Street of Death and Other Stories, and Bassem Breish’s Free Range. “It’s not necessary to go to film school,” insists Dagher. “I wanted to study film initially, but I didn’t. I was going to go to med school but because I knew how to draw I went to art school and did one year of animation. Then I quit because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. But throughout this process I started doing storyboards for advertising, shooting music videos, shooting other random stuff, and that’s how through the years I’ve kind of learnt the techniques of the practice, and I think that’s the best way to learn, rather than just sitting in a class. It’s more important to live things and learn about life first before making films. I don’t regret not going to film school because I feel that at 18 I wouldn’t have been ready to make films, because I wouldn’t have had anything to talk about, honestly.”
My work is centred on disillusionment – a disease that’s spread across Lebanon and makes people unwilling to take any action or change things. - Ely Dagher
I tried a lot of times to move out of Lebanon but I always come back, because there is stuff to talk about. - Jessy Moussalem