Beirut, May 10: Armed with their cameras, determination and a painful past, Lebanese filmmakers and their tales of war have caught the attention of audiences worldwide after taking off at festivals such as Cannes.
“Movies aren’t just from Hollywood, or Europe. Cinema is a global art, film is a living thing,” said festival director Thierry Fremaux ahead of the May 12-23 event.
Dogged by censorship, unrest and funding issues, the Middle East will be represented only by Iran and Israel this year. Yet Ziad Doueiry’s “West Beirut,” Josef Fares’ “Zozo” and Philippe Aractinji’s “Under the Bombs” are a few examples of films that have resonated with audiences from Cannes to Toronto.
Lebanon, which prides itself on being more liberal than its neighbours in the largely conservative Middle East, has produced movies that explore topics ranging from exile to gender and sexuality.
But the most popular topic for Lebanese films remains the country’s bloody 1975-1990 civil war, which killed more than 150,000 people and left countless others maimed, displaced and scarred for life.
“It’s not that we only want to talk about the war,” said Aractinji, whose docudrama “Under the Bombs” was shot on location in the wake of a devastating 2006 Israeli war on south Lebanon.
“However, the war, reality, always comes back,” he said from Paris, where he is based. “It comes back to haunt you.”
But Lebanon’s filmmakers insist their country harbours stories that extend beyond the war era.
Aractinji made Lebanon’s first post-war musical, “Bosta,” which came out in 2005 and tells the story of a dance troupe that is reunited after the war and tours Lebanon, bringing music and dance to rural villages.
Nadine Labaki’s 2007 film “Caramel,” too, showcased another side of a country long associated with violence — and landed in the Cannes Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight along the way.
The film, which Labaki co-wrote, directed and starred in, follows four women in a beauty salon in Beirut through their daily struggles with gender, age, sexuality and religion.
“The idea people had of Lebanon is different from what they saw in ‘Caramel’,” Labaki told said in Beirut.
“They discovered the warm, colourful people of a sunny country,” said the director, who finished filming only nine days before the outbreak of the 2006 war.
“On any given sunny day, we do have problems other than the war, which is what I focused on.”
Lebanese filmmakers have also caught the eye of US production house Disney, which has tapped one of them to create its first Arabic-language feature film.
“The Last of the Storytellers,” written and directed by Chadi Zeneddine, pays tribute to the Middle Eastern tradition of folkloric storytelling and is set to wrap up shooting in 2010.
But the 31-year-old director is tight-lipped on the details, preferring to keep the content a surprise.
“It deals with our own traditions, our storytellers,” Zeneddine told said in Paris, where he is based.
“I don’t believe in Arab audiences, or Lebanese audiences,” he added. “I believe in the film. There is a story that has to be told and if you tell it well, it will strike a chord with people everywhere.”
Zeneddine, who was born in Gabon and did not witness civil war first-hand, came to international attention two years ago with a movie he says was a rite of passage.
His 2008 feature film “Falling from Earth,” screened in Paris, New York and soon in Beirut, follows four people grappling with the aftermath of the civil war, including an old man who collects photographs of happy people and a woman who waits — and waits — for her husband to come home.
“I felt guilty. I felt I would never be accepted as a Lebanese unless I shared the pain of war with them,” he said.
“My film is not about the physical damages of the war. It’s about the trauma that you carry, how people breathe differently after the war,” Zeneddine explained.
“We’re not the same people anymore — war changes you.”
But while nearby countries like Syria and Israel increasingly provide their filmmakers with government support, Lebanese directors are left to their own devices.
“Our potential is enormous,” Aractinji explained. “We have stories, a history, the know-how, but we don’t have any organised means for us to tell these stories.
“In terms of production, we’re falling behind the rest of the region,” Aractinji said.
“It is completely absurd for me to be a filmmaker telling the stories of my country and to have to live in another country in order to find funds.”
And although Disney beckons for the moment, Zeneddine — like Aractinji — hopes to return to Lebanon soon for a new project.
“The big problem in Lebanon is that nobody won or lost the war,” he said. “In a sense, there was no closure. To many, the war is not over yet.”
Aractinji agrees: “We make these films to overcome the war.”
—Agencies