Cinema in the New Lebanon

I am having a bad production day today, so I thought why not write about the best production times for Lebanon.

Lebanon is a country rich with talent and with stories. We have an excellent foundation for cinematic resources. We have beautiful and various location types: Mountains, beaches, forests, valleys, cities and villages, etc... We have many cinema and audiovisual programs at universities and institutes, that graduate hundreds of students every year and throw them into the market.

Yet when it comes to film production, we have huge trouble financing films of world quality. Even well known talents like Nadine Labaki and Ziad Doueiri have to fill out funding applications from Arab and Foreign film funds. This post is not to complain about funding applications but rather to complain about the lack of financing from our Ministry of Culture. Culture is one thing we might still have a chance with in our Lebanon.

Last I visited the Ministry of Culture in an old building that needs a grant itself, the employees informed us that the ministry provides a maximum amount of 8 Million Lebanese Liras (5,300 USD) for feature films.

In the new Lebanon, the ministry of culture will provide grants of up to 200,000 USD per feature film. It will finance five films every year and will not grant the same filmmaker money two years in a row. It will encourage Arab and Foreign countries to come co-produce films in/with Lebanese producers. Lebanese films will take 2 to 3 years to get made instead of the 5 to 7 years it now takes each of them to be made.

In the new Lebanon, the ministry of culture will also protect cinema artists to tell whatever stories they want to tell, in total freedom. The ministry will realize that art is necessary for society's evolution, not for political propaganda purposes. And in that new Lebanon, there will be a Lebanese film in Cannes and Berlin and Venice every year.

In the new Lebanon, the Lebanese people will flock to movie theaters to watch stories about their own society, not about other societies in other continents only. Through watching these stories, the Lebanese people will ask themselves questions, will try to find answers, will laugh and will cry, and will realize that Lebanon matters; that there is hope for a country when it has artists with beautiful and colorful spirits who actually respect the audience and treat its members as smart human beings; artists who want to touch their hearts and minds and tell them powerful stories that need to be told to the world.

Reblogged: "Sick of Beirut: Me, Beirut and suffocation"

This is a poem I am reblogging from sickofbeirut.blogspot.com 

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Wellywood Woman: Niam Itani (1) - Before the Venice Film Festival

Wellywood Woman: Niam Itani (1) - Before the Venice Film Festival: Niam Itani Niam Itani (also Etany) is the only woman director among the ten finalists in YouTube’s short film competition,  Your Film Fes...

Super.Full. played at AsterFest in Macedonia yesterday. Here is the trailer of the festival which has an excellent line up of films from various countries all over the world.

AsterFest Official Website

It All Burns Down to...Memories

Everything. Whatever happened earlier today. Yesterday. The week before. Last month. The whole year that ended. Since I came to Lebanon. Five years at Al Jazeera. My agonizing years once upon a time. University. School. I wonder how many terra bytes can my memory hold. Two is very little. Maybe twenty. Or two hundred. Sometimes I want to write them down before I forget them. At other times I just tell myself, "forget". There will be space for happiness when you forget the pain. But is that really all what we remember? The pain?

I am only writing this because I needed to write, really. I miss writing. I secretly envy my students at LAU because they get asked to write and are given a deadline. I am left to write at my leisure.

I often go back to wanting to write about home. What I still fail to define and recognize, but miss nevertheless. Was Beirut ever my home? I hate to even think that there may be a yes to that question. Even if it would be a temporary one. Like for a month. When I was a day old.

People find it funny that I don't brag about Beirut being my home & my city. I mean, who wouldn't want a place like this for a home? Right?
And I wonder to myself, though I now know the formula, I wonder, what do they like about the city. The formula is simple. For foreigners, visitors, passers by who will never feel trapped in this city, they are at total luxury to enjoy its magic. They can come and go whenever they want. They are always treated well -for the most part- because they have money (mostly), they are interesting (ajenib!), or because it is simply cool to hang out with someone who "looks" civilized once in a while for a change.

Today I drove to Dahyeh to offer condolences to a relative's family. The single traffic light that I had to pass on Hadi Nasrallah Highway was a piece of furniture for many drivers (not all).

Close to the house of the wake, there is also a new sad story which foreigners might find disturbing and I find sick, but people here have grown to find it normal. A newly wed groom was bragging to his wife about his gun and jokingly fired it. Into her head. I don't think I want to comment on this incident. I leave it to you. Honestly, I don't know what the hell am I typing anymore. Good Night, Folks!