Our Heedless Wars

The Infidels

The story takes place in an around Lebanon. It concerns Farid, a repentant Islamic fundamentalist and Charles, a French diplomat. Farid is prepared to give the French secret service a list of names of terrorists operating in France on the condition that they liberate a friend of his imprisoned in France. The deal is complicated by the fact that Farid and Charles are irresistably attracted to each other, which inflames great jealously in Charles' wife, Juliette, estranging the couple.

Sand Screens

A city emerges in the middle of the desert and dies in its richness. Women are doubly veiled, and freedoms are even more threatened. Sarah was born the day after the oil boom. She is part of the generation that believes it can get anything with the power of money, and that simultaneously sees its every desire thwarted when it conflicts with the strict laws of its country. She is unsettled by the triviality of her life and unsettles others through her beauty, and her will to push everything to its extreme. She fears not the desert, not the wind, nothing. Her thirst lies elsewhere: to leave the desert, which she hates, and in which she is kept against her will. She wanders the empty streets in her limousine, killing time on the phone, provoking strangers. Gradually, tensions arise in this desert, instilling a latent anguish interrupted by bursts of happiness, of ecstatic laughter, and of sensuality, until everything comes to a head.

A Civilized People

Lebanese director Randa Chahal Sabbag spins this bleak war drama about the brutal absurdity of the urban warfare of Beirut during the 1980s. Opening with the shocking image of kittens being blown apart, the film loosely follows the travails of Bernadette (Nada Ghosn), a naïve country girl sent to the city as a maid for a mansion long since abandoned by the owners. There she meets Therese (Renee Dick), a veteran house cleaner who takes her under her wing. One day, while accompanying her friend to the cemetery, she meets a rakish Arab militiaman, and the two fall in love.

The Kite

A young 15 year old girl, Lamia, lives in a southern Lebanese village on the border with Israel. She is given in marriage to her cousin on the other side of the border. As Lamia crosses the barbed wire she also passes from childhood into adulthood, as brutal as our countries and the events that are to follow.

Step by Step

Shot between February 1976 and March 1978, Step by Step compacts the chaos of the Lebanese civil war using archival images, news broadcasts, interviews, and raw documentary footage.

Souha, Surviving Hell

The film follows Souha Béchara’s return to her village, Deir Mimas, to the Khiam jail, in the very place where she tried to assassinate General Lahd. For Souha, surviving hell is a joyful, thoughtful, and liberating travel diary. The diary of a trip that, for a moment, let one believe in the possible reconciliation of our country.