Simple Passion

A young woman searches through war-torn and rebuilding Beirut for a man who took pictures of her home. A home she has only ever known in ruins.

In this documentary road movie, filmmaker Danielle Arbid tries to conjure up an image of the country that is called Israel or Palestine.

Beirut is a wonderful town. It's like you're at the center of everything. In Beirut, between 1975 and 1990, there was a civil war, everybody wanted to exterminate everybody. Today, war is over. It stopped a day, like that, after having corrupted our lives. I wanted to shoot the void it had left. Its ghostly presence. That wound...

The life of lawyer Roxane turns upside down when her husband Samuel is accused of rape. She is forced to return to her underprivileged childhood town, where she must defend the local criminals she once fled.

Suzanne and Osmane meet in crisis-ridden Beirut. Osmane is a young Sudanese man without papers, searching for a better future; Suzanne is a widow with Palestinian roots more than twice his age. Against all odds, they fall in love.

The intersecting lives of teens on a surfing trip, a woman with a weak heart and two teams of doctors and medical experts.

Lina, a young girl in war-torn Beirut, finds an ally and friend in Sihan, her domineering aunt's maid. Sihan shows Lina what her life could be like, but tests the girl's limits when she asks her to help plot her escape from the city.

Archival footage of prim young girls alternates with darkened shots of men and women discussing their formative experiences and their fantasies. Their words and the visual representations create a highly poetic erotic tension.

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.

While thousands of tourists invade the beaches, camping grounds and clubs, five teenagers from Porto Vecchio hang out. One evening one of them leads the others to an unoccupied luxury villa. They spend the night there. Before they leave, they steal some objects of no value and two prize rifles. When the house owner arrives from Paris, she complains about the theft to a small local boss she knows…

One evening, a married young singer Zoha meets the French lawyer Mathieu in a night club in Beirut. Mathieu will become suspected of spying, while Zoha is trying to flee from her husband. Despite these problems, the two will witness a love story for few days mixed with violence and fear.

Inspired by the photographic travels of Antione d'Agata, Danielle Arbid's worldly drama follows a French photographer who travels the globe to seek out the most extreme experiences imaginable. Thomas is a fearless shutterbug who's always willing to put his life on the line for the sake of a good shot. Upon falling under the spell of an enigmatic old man named Fouad Saleh, the photographer travels to the Far East in hopes of uncovering the secrets of the man who can no longer recall his own past. As the photographer soon finds out, it's often the most innocent endeavors that yield the most profound and transformative results.