Views from Beirut, Syria, and Montreal, as Lebanese Film Festival screenings run September 23 to 25
Highlights include Broken Keys, Memory Box, and The Blue Inmates
Memory Box
The Lebanese Film Festival runs at SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts from September 23 to 25
THE WORLD OF petty crime in Beirut, civil war, and two couples who meet in a maternity suite: those are just some of the subjects tackled in feature films and documentaries at this year’s program put on by the Lebanese Film Festival in Canada in partnership with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs.
Kicking things off is Zeina Daccache’s searing documentary The Blue Inmates, which follows the residents of Lebanon’s Roumieh Prison as they produce a play about the treatment of fellow prisoners live with mental illness. Under the Lebanese Penal Code, enacted in 1943, offenders who are “Insane”, “Mad” or “Possessed” offenders have to be incarcerated in a special psychiatry unit until evidence of “being cured”—which, with no treatment, amounts to a life sentence.
The same night, check out David Oryan’s C-Section, which takes place in a maternity ward where two couples, one rich and one poor, unwillingly meet in the same hospital’s recovery room.
September 24 at 6:30 is the fest’s big, red-carpet screening: Broken Keys, a Cannes 2020 Official Selection and the entry for best Lebanese international film in the Oscars. Set in 2013 in a war-torn village in Syria, it centres on Karim, a musician who has to sell his beloved piano to leave Syria in 13 days, but when a terrorist leader bursts into the apartment and destroys it, he’s forced to enlist the help of a little boy named Ziad to rebuild it—eventually, taking a dangerous journey to replace its parts.
September 25, check out the animated feature The Prophet and Memory Box, about a Montreal teen who dives into her mother’s notebooks, cassette tapes, and photos from tumultuous 1980s Beirut. The fest closes that evening with Beirut Hold’em, about an ex-con and petty gambler who wants to restart his life. Arriving back in the Lebanese capital after serving time, he finds his family fractured by his brother’s death, his girlfriend getting ready to emigrate, all his money stolen, and his three best friends scraping by through shady business deals.
Beirut Hold’em
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