From war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics, two young sisters embark on a risky voyage, putting their hearts and their swimming skills to heroic use.
Paris, France, 1979. Rose, a rebellious orphaned teenager, and Michel, a young aspiring painter, enjoy their crazy love under the neon lights of the decadent nightclub Le Palace, where they establish an ambiguous relationship with Lucille and Hubert, two bohemian bourgeois who will change their...
Lebanon, 1982. To keep a promise made to an old friend, Georges, an idealistic theater director, travels to Beirut for a project as utopian as it is risky: to stage the play Antigone on the front line, in order to steal a moment of peace from the raging civil war. The characters will be played by...
Maia, a single mother, lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex. On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected delivery: notebooks, tapes, and photos Maia, from 13 to 18 years old, sent from Beirut to her best friend who left for Paris to escape the civil war. Maia refuses to open the box...
18-year-old Lina arrives in Paris for her studies. She comes to look for what she has never found in Lebanon, her country of origin: a certain form of freedom. The survival instinct as the only baggage, she sails from one Paris to another to the rhythm of her romantic encounters.
Video #2 of Finite Rants, a series of eight visual essays commissioned by Fondazione Prada and curated by Luigi Alberto Cippini and Niccolò Gravina. Bertrand Bonello reworks the last minutes of his 2016 film Nocturama, which documents the logistical operations and the organization of terrorist...
The exits of a Berlin courtyard are blocked by the police due to an ambiguous event outside and a state of emergency occurs. Among the residents of the building, insecurities start to pump fear. Suspicion takes over panic, prejudices bring polarization and another question appears: Is the real...
Joseph and his two sons, Joachim and Ivan, form a close-knit family but fail to see that each one is losing control of his life. Joachim is supposed to be studying psychiatry but spends most of his time daydreaming about his ex-girlfriend, Ivan cannot fit in at school despite being very smart, and...
A young woman makes her way back home to her parents’ house in the middle of the night leaving a bad experience behind. Haunting pressures to fit back into the family dynamics as well as revealing details of her life abroad weigh heavy on her. Feeling cornered, her anxieties resurface, leading...
Malek, a Lebanese immigrant from Montreal, is haunted by the violent death of his sister. Convinced that he could have avoided this tragedy, he is consumed with guilt. He lives alone, poor, jobless until he meets Shohreh, an Iranian girl, with whom he falls in love. A new life opens up to him and...
Four darkly funny tales about Lebanon: Activists planning a protest descend into internal strife. Three sisters and their mother argue while an incompetent plumber destroys their flat. Depressed life coach Malek wants to die and seeks help from a «death coach». A stand-up comedian who jokes about...
Ulysses, a secluded artist who mysteriously retired a few years ago, meets Mona, a young art student full of life. The encounter will change them both.
Damascus, Spring 2011. It's the early stages of the civil war. 25-year-old Nahla is torn between her desire for freedom and the hope of leaving the country thanks to her arranged marriage with Samir, a Syrian expatriate in the USA. When he chooses her younger, more docile sister Myriam, Nahla finds...
In post-war Lebanon, Ida, a young Lebanese girl, flees her small village and her alcoholic mother and goes to the big city. There, she starts dating a European man not knowing what is in store for her.
In three reenactments of a controversial 1983 television interview, actors Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval play late French actress Maria Schneider. “The Listening Takes” is a prescient confrontation with the patriarchal structure of the film industry. [Overview Courtesy of...
In 1983, French actress Maria Schneider gives an interview for the TV show Cinéma Cinémas. The conversation takes an unexpected turn when she challenges film industry practices and is asked to talk about the controversial film Last Tango in Paris (1972).
Set in the desolate wreckage of Beirut’s Piccadilly Theater after decades of war, the film recounts three days in the life of a writer and actors. As they seek to revive the ghostly theater with a production of Sophocles’ Elektra, the actors witness the vivid dreams of the writer who has to...
"Manal Issa" is a sequel to Elisabeth Subrin's "The Listening Tapes" culled from hours of conversations between Elisabeth in the U.S. and Manal in Lebanon. It intimately considers the role of the actor during the unfolding global conflict. [Overview Courtesy of Participant Inc.]
