Tag Archives: Nadine Labaki

Hezbollah’s Culture of Death Attacks Nadine Labaki’s Triumph at Cannes

You would think that a Lebanese director becoming the first Lebanese and Arab female director to win big at Cannes would be a cause for celebration.

You would think that Nadine Labaki’s important win at Cannes for her newest movie Capharnaüm would be a cause of pride in all Lebanese, regardless of who they are and where they come from.

You would think the above two statements would be a given any day, in any country, but in the country of Hezbollah, the pride and celebration of other people in the country are entities they are not okay with.

It all started yesterday when Manar Sabbagh, an Al Manar reporter, tweeted the following:

Her tweet, calling Lebanese people celebrating Nadine Labaki’s win “the sons of Phoenicia,” ridiculing them and belittling them in the process, telling them that there’s no reason to be proud of Nadine Labaki’s accomplishment because of the superiority of the deaths of Hezbollah militants in Syria.

The opium of the resistance is pretty high in this one, it seems. How the hell does a movie about mistreated children, child brides, illegal workers and a Lebanese director winning at Cannes somehow turn into an existential crisis for Hezbollah members who are so pressed about the populace not being eternally at their ass adorning them with kisses? Einstein needs to be resurrected to figure it out, I bet.

Not only is Nadine Labaki’s latest movie devoid of Israeli influences, references, anything that is related to that entity that must not be named, but her entire win at Cannes literally has nothing to do with anything that Hezbollah pertains to. And yet here we are. In this culture of death that they are entrenching the country in, the space that they are leaving for people who want to celebrate such moments – few as they are – is becoming as narrow as possible.

Alas, it doesn’t end there.

Today, Hezbollah deputy Nawaf el Moussawi decided to pitch in as well:

With a play on words, he says that when the going gets tough, the only thing that protects us is our weapons, and by “our” he means the weapons of his party, the same weapons that were – at many points in the past 10 years – used against the very same Lebanese citizens they said they wanted to protect, and those weapons that were taken to war in Syria, to protect a tyrant who killed and decimated Lebanese people over thirty years of his and his father’s rule over our country, to “protect” us from groups that are best friends with that tyrant.

No, I am not thankful for that, nor am I grateful.

Today, this culture of death and treason that is being perpetuated by entities like Manar Sabbagh and Nawaf el Moussawi is a cancer plaguing Lebanese society, bolstered by the fact that few are willing to tell them enough is enough, and supported by hundreds of thousands of their militants who when told go, they go.

This culture of death, where a Lebanese director is ridiculed, her achievements miniaturized, where those celebrating her are described in condescending terms, is a slippery slope until these people turn the country – and they are well underway – into a country that only resembles them.

This culture of death sees an insult in a director telling the story of a Syrian refugee that was rendered as such by the very same regime they’re fighting for. It sees in art an affront to the limitations they believe are enough for everyone. It sees in their own perception of what matters as the only marker for everyone else to judge and be judged. Hell no.

Today, it is more important than ever to stand up to the rhetoric that is propagated by the likes of Manar Sabbag and Nawaf el Moussawi. The two visions we want for our country cannot be more at odds.

We want art, cinema, achievements, celebrations of humane causes, highlighting of human struggles, attempts to advance our country forward, not bring it back to whatever the Ayatollah expects.

Nadine Labaki, we are proud of you and of what you have done.

Nadine Labaki’s “Capharnaüm” Wins The Jury Prize at the 2018 Cannes Festival

What an accomplishment.

Nadine Labaki just became the first Lebanese director to win such a top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s the festival’s third highest prize.

After receiving a 15 minute standing ovation after its screening on Thursday, the film immediately became a front runner, at the heel of what some are calling “the best baby performance in the history of cinema.”

Capharnaüm, with its Lebanese and international release dates to be determined, tells the story of Zain, a 12 year old Lebanese child, who sues his parents for bringing him into the life they’ve given him: that of squalor, poverty, abuse, child brides, and lack of papers.

The reviewer for The Guardian called the middle section of the movie so ambitious that he doesn’t even know how Nadine Labaki pulled it off, calling the movie a favorite for the Best Foreign Feature Oscar as well for next year’s awards. Deadline, on the other hand, called the movie an instant foreign language Oscar front runner, believing the movie should even go beyond that category, the way Amour did in 2013.

With this movie, it seems Nadine Labaki has upped her game from the already high bar she set with her previous two features, and at this point it seems the sky is her limit. I cannot wait to see what this ingenious Lebanese director, the best in her generation, has to keep offering.

If anything, I hope that with movies like Capharnaüm, Lebanese moviemakers realize the importance of telling the stories that Lebanese society entails. Those are the kind of movies we should be making, as we touch on the wounds that plague our communities in our attempt to heal them.

Furthermore, the movie even features an Ethiopian refugee named Yordanos Shifera who’s been living in Lebanon without proper documents. That same actress has now been given the chance to walk the red carpet of an award winning movie in which she had a vital role. That’s amazing.

There’s already a scene circulating online from the movie, which you can watch here:

This is reportedly the opening scene of the movie.

Congrats Nadine Labaki. You made all of us proud, and I hope you keep receiving the accolades for your new masterpiece.

Nadine Labaki’s New Movie “Capharnaüm” Is Part Of The 2018 Cannes Festival Official Selection, First Lebanese Movie Since 1991

After Georges Nasser’s films “Ila Ayn” 1957, “Le Petit Étranger” 1962, and Maroun Baghdadi’s “Hors La Vie” 1991, Nadine Labaki’s latest “Capharnaüm” is chosen to be in the official competition at the 2018 Cannes Festival.

While the movie does not have a trailer yet, and neither do we have an official synopsis of what it is about, this is such an honor to bestow on this phenomenal Lebanese director whose previous two films were also critically acclaimed, with Where Do We Go Now winning the top prize at the Toronto Film Festival and being nominated for a Critics Choice Award in 2009.

Being part of the Official Selection at Cannes means that Capharnaüm  is in the running for the show’s top prize – the Palme D’Or – for best movie. Nadine’s previous movies were selected for a different, less prestigious subset, the “Un Certain Regard” selection.

Other movies that were selected along with Capharnaüm are:

  • Le Livre D’Image, dir: Jean-Luc Godard
  • Blackkklansman, dir: Spike Lee
  • Three Faces, dir: Jafar Panahi
  • Cold War, dir: Pawel Pawlikowski
  • Leto, dir: Kirill Serebrennikov
  • Lazzaro Felice, dir: Alice Rohrwacher
  • Under The Silver Lake, dir: David Robert Mitchell
  • Capernaum, dir: Nadine Labaki
  • At War, dir: Stephane Brizé
  • Asako I&II, dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
  • Sorry Angel, dir: Christophe Honoré
  • Dogman, dir: Matteo Garrone
  • Girls Of The Sun, dir: Eva Husson
  • Yomeddine, dir: A.B Shawky
  • Burning, dir: Lee-Chang Dong
  • Shoplifters, dir: Kore-Eda Hirokazu
  • Ash Is Purest White, dir: Jia Zhang-Ke

The fact that Nadine Labaki is in the running against a legend such as Jean-Luc Goddard is an honor in itself.

I personally can’t wait to see Capernaum, and hope it’s as phenomenal as the honors it’s being bestowed indicate.

Beirut Madinati: Giving Meaning To The Municipal Elections & Hope For A Better Future

Beirut Madinati

Over the past several weeks, a true grassroots movement has been overtaking the streets of Beirut as a new movement trying to reclaim the city it calls home began its rise; Beirut Madinati was doing something that Beirutis hadn’t seen in a very long time, if ever: they were holding gatherings in different neighborhoods across the city to talk to the city’s own people about their woes, to tell them that we are not a Hariri-appointed list of people who believe they are entitled to your vote, we will work for it and this is us doing so.

Of course, the work of Beirut Madinati did not start when our Municipal Elections became an inevitability. Over the past years, the same supporters and people behind this robust youthful movement were orchestrating many of the protests we’ve all been supporting and advocating for. They called to have Horsh Beirut re-opened and succeeded in it being as such on Saturdays. They fought against the demolition of many of Beirut’s culturally important landmarks. They are fighting against the Fouad Boutros Highway that will destroy any remnant of Achrafieh as we know it.

Today, they are giving their fights a name and it is aptly called: Beirut, my city.

Giving Meaning To The Elections:

Over the past several years, the municipal elections of the city of Beirut were everything but “democratic.” The city’s key parties, mostly the Future Movement, appoints a list of the city’s candidates, without any inkling of equality, and that list ends up winning by near acclamation. No one stands a chance. Correction, no one stood a chance. Until now.

Beirut Madinati is a group of men and women, of all ages and backgrounds, fighting to reclaim the city they call home and let it become the place they know it can be. Their composition is breaking the boundaries of Lebanese politics itself. Instead of having only 3 women on the Municipal board, Beirut Madinati is reportedly submitting the candidature of 12 women – exactly half. One of those women is brilliant Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. One of the men nominated is Yorgui Teyrouz, the founder of Donner Sang Compter, the NGO that has saved thousands of lives since its inception.

The names of Beirut Madinati’s candidates have not been fully announced yet. However, the list was obtained not because someone is something up the echelons of a given party, without any consideration to that person’s qualifications, but through a rigorous process that involved more than 80 members of the movement. All opinions were heard. Even the head of municipality promised by that list will be an engineer because their plan needs someone with that background to implement it.

This is not the politics of Lebanon which has almost always emanated from the dark ages, but rather citizens of this city trying to do things the way they should be done: with a modern inclusive approach, and a futuristic look at how things need to be. Today, Beirut Madinati is giving meaning to Beirut’s municipal elections. They are giving us a choice.

Giving Hope To The City:

Beirut Madinati giving the people of Beirut the possibility of having a voice come May 8th does not come without them being aware of the responsibility that entails. As such, for the first time in years as well, the people of Beirut have a set of candidates who are running to work for a platform that is conceived through careful and scientific assessment of Beirut of 2016, with what they hope for Beirut to become by 2022 when their term ends.

The platform is divided into 10 main entities, which I will summarize below, but you can read the full 30 pages program at this link (click):

  1. Better public transportation to encourage people to rely less on private cars (today’s rates are 70%), and enable more use of bikes and walking, thereby reducing traffic substantially as well as pollution.
  2. Increase Beirut’s green spaces from 1 squared meter from person to at least 5 squared meters by 2022 with at least one public garden per local community.
  3. Work on decreasing the price of apartments in Beirut so they can become more affordable to its people. The average today is $570,000 per apartment.
  4. Start recycling programs in the city where garbage goes at rates of 90% to landfills, to a goal of 40% recycling by 2022.
  5. Protect Beirut’s heritage. No more random demolitions for buildings that hold value to the city’s past and history.
  6. Increasing the number of public libraries and community spaces available. The city currently has only THREE public libraries.
  7. Adjust taxation rates in the city to enable better equality and better job opportunities. 1 in 4 of Beirut’s youth are currently unemployed.
  8. Make governmental buildings in Beirut more eco-friendly.
  9. Improve health in the city by addressing the water pollution, monitoring its quality, and improving air quality by, for instance, removing the open air waste bins (those giant green Sukleen ones).
  10. Better training for municipality staff to better address concerns of citizens.

Not only will this program, if implemented, bring Beirut head on into the 21st century city it should be, but it would also boost the quality of life of millions of Lebanese who call the city their home, whether they actually vote there or not.

By bettering public transportation, access to the city becomes easier. You’d no longer need to spend ninety minutes in your car stuck at Nahr el Kaleb every morning. With less traffic, more people would find it easier to live in the suburbs or areas around Beirut, bringing real estate prices down. With better governance, citizens of the city would have better accountability. They’d know who messed up and how. It would no longer be the time for murky politics. The examples and ramifications are endless.

They are also running without politicians backing them. They rely on regular people like us for support and donations to keep their campaign going. So donate at the link (here) if you can.

Your Choice On May 8th:

I may not be a Beirut voter, but I’ll be damned if I weren’t going to use this platform to advocate for such a group. Winning is, obviously, Beirut Madinati’s goal but the showing they will have on May 8th, regardless of numbers, will be substantial enough to tell the entrenched Beiruti establishment that the city’s people are no longer subdued to the demented politics bringing about the same municipality over and over again, different people perhaps, but same useless agenda every time.

Your vote for Beirut Madinati on May 8th is telling those politicians that have taken you for granted over and over again that you are not just another number they can move and calculate however they please, but a citizen who knows he or she is entitled to a municipality that cares for their future and not to have its members gain a title, a source of income for their bottom line, and have this political party or that say they control the city and consequently you.

On May 8th, your vote as a Beiruti matters. Rise above the meaningless politics. Challenge the establishment. Set your city on the path that befits it. On May 8th, vote against the status quo and for a better future.

Caramel, The Attack, 12 Angry Lebanese on International Best Movies Lists

 

The Guardian has  published a list of the top 10 Arab movies and they featured Zeina Daccache’s Twelve Angry Lebanese on the list, with nine other Egyptian movies of which I haven’t heard.

The list’s author justified their choice for choosing the movie in it being deeply moving and full of humanity. I have to wonder why that movie hasn’t made a splash in Lebanon:

I was on the jury when this won the top documentary award at Dubai in 2009. The director is a young Lebanese drama-therapist who put on a production of 12 Angry Men inside Lebanon’s most notorious prison and filmed the long protracted process. The film was partly an attempt to reform the country’s criminal and penal laws and improve prison living conditions. It also enabled Daccache to extend her drama-therapy work to prisons across Lebanon, and she had started working in Syria shortly before the current conflict began. It is deeply moving and full of humanity, particularly in the way it describes the process of lifting men from a profound states of despair into a renewed desire to live and build a different future for themselves.

As a follow-up to that list, The Huffington Post wouldn’t take it. As such, they published their own list of 6 movies they believe The Guardian missed and included Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack and Nadine Labaki’s Caramel.

On the latter, the author wrote:

Labaki’s film was my in. I’m a relative newcomer to the magical world of cinema from MENA, having been brought up on a mixture of Woody Allen, the works of Fellini and Visconti, all sprinkled with a bit of Lina Wertmüller, and Caramel got me hooked from the first frame. It’s sensual, full of life and each time I watch it, it makes me proud to be a woman. It’s also the reason I yearned to travel to Beirut, and once I got there, I could see Labaki’s lushly constructed characters at every turn. I may be a romantic, but it’s a must watch for anyone who has yet to discover the beauty of Lebanese cinema. And its people. Labaki’s follow up, Where Do We Go Now? is also a greatly entertaining lesson in peace.

On The Attack:

Showcased at the Dubai Film Festival last December, Doueiri’s film is currently screening across the U.S.. The tragic story, of a Palestinian surgeon who discovers his marriage may not have been what it seemed, was what engulfed emotionally, at first. But then the absurd politics that enveloped the project really drove its profound meaning home for me. Lebanon banned the film because Doueiri had “snuck” into Israel to film his project, which of course was indispensable to the truthfulness of the story. A Gulf film organization distanced itself from The Attack though it had partly financed it in development. Of course, Doueiri is now having the last laugh, because his film has been winning prizes and hearts around the world, but The Attack remains a great example of why watching a film is almost always better than watching the news.

Lebanese filmmakers seem to be doing a rather fine job at having their works make a dent abroad.  It’s great to see Lebanese cinema getting such recognition abroad, especially with movies that are not what we’ve come to believe our filmmakers only know how to make.

It is sad that a movie such as The Attack will not be screened here for the most absurd reasons. I had the chance to watch the movie while on a trip to Paris and while I wasn’t as engrossed by it as the French with whom I shared the theatre or other Lebanese who found it highly engaging, I could appreciate the need for such a movie especially given the intense discussion it spurred with the Lebanese who watched the movie with me.

I believe that’s what cinema should do: spring up debate and discussion, especially in this country and specifically when it comes to topics that are still considered so taboo that discussing them can have “treason” plastered all over you. It seems those foreigners appreciate our movies more than we do.