Lebanese producer Christelle Younes was set to attend Italy’s MIA Market this week to pitch feature film project So The Lovers Could Come Out Again in the Rome event’s Co-Pro Market but has cancelled the trip.
She also abandoned a trip to Jordan last week for the Royal Film Commission’s inaugural Arab Producers Lab (APL), a joint initiative with European producers’ org EAVE on which she had been selected as one of the first six participants.
Instead, she is hunkering down in northern Lebanon, monitoring the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed, armed group Hezbollah, having left her home in the Achrafieh area of East Beirut.
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The upscale district has been spared the relentless Israeli bombardments that have pounded Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon and Beirut since late September, but at an airstrike in the neighboring area of Basta last Thursday killed at least 22 people and wounded 117 others .
“We’ve come North because there is no conflict, no airstrikes,” Younes told Deadline, but speaking ahead of an Israeli airstrike on a predominantly Christian village in Northern Lebanon on Monday, which killed 20 people.
At least 1.2 million people, or just under one fifth of the Lebanese population, have left their homes in recent weeks in search of safety, while the Lebanese Health Ministry says more than 2,000 have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
Tensions have been running high between Israel and Hezbollah ever since the latter stepped up missile strikes on northern Israel the day after the Hamas terror attack on southern Israel on October 7, which killed more than 1,100 people. More than 60,000 Israelis are unable to return to their homes.
Iran has since launched two major drone and missile attacks on Israel in April and early October, while a targeted Iranian drone strike on an Israeli army base near the central city of Binyamina over the weekend, killed four soldiers and injured more than 60 others.
In Lebanon’s complex sectarian society – divided in broad terms between Shia and Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze – many parts of the population do not support Hezbollah. At the same time, there is rage across all sections of society at the 42,000 deaths in Gaza due to Israel’s military campaign in retaliation for October 7, as well as fear Lebanon faces the same fate.
Younes, who produces under the banner of BRTSWT Pictures, managed to participate in the RFC-Eave workshop online but says the experience was not the same. The European producers on So The Lovers Could Come Out Again – the UK’s Caspian Films, Italy’s Palosanto Films and France’s Georges Film – are representing the project at MIA.
The drama about two snipers who grow close during the Lebanon’s 1975 to 1990 Civil War, will be the second feature of George Peter Barbari, whose coming-of-age drama debut Death of a Virgin, and the Sin of Not Living world premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama section in 2021.
“We cancelled because it’s not very safe to go to the airport,” explained Younes, on the decision to abandon the Rome trip. “It’s open but there is bombing all around. It doesn’t make sense to risk your life taking a flight, and then maybe getting stuck in another country, unable to return to your family, to your bed.”
In Limbo
This is the situation of producer Myriam Sassine whose flight home to Beirut from L.A. – where she was attending the Film Independent Forum – was cancelled. She is now in Cairo, waiting for her husband to join her, and working out of the offices of Egyptian indie production company Film Clinic.
“I’m in limbo. I was supposed to go back to Beirut, but I had lots of work trip lined-up between now and the end of December, and it didn’t seem feasible to be coming and going from Lebanon,” she says. “I’ve shifted my base to Cairo for the moment so I can do all the trips and figure out my next steps.”
The uncertainty over the future direction of the conflict, comes at a transitional moment for Sassine, who is in the process of launching her own company after parting ways with her long-term home of Abbout Productions.
She spent more than a decade at the company, where her most recent credits included Mounia Akl’s Costa Brava; Lebanon, Cyril Aris’s documentary Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano, on the making of the the previous film, and Myriam El Hajj’s Diaries From Lebanon.
Sassine stepped back from producing for a time following the challenge of getting Costa Brava, Lebanon over the line against the backdrop of the Lebanese financial crisis, the pandemic and the devastating port of Beirut explosion in August 2020.
The latter event sent Sassine and Akl through flying through the air as they worked on pre-production in Abbout’s downtown offices, and the pair were still traumatized by the experience a year later when the film finally world premiered in Venice.
Sassine recently re-embraced the profession with short film Coyotes by Palestinian director Siad Zagha. The thriller stars Maria Zreik (A Gaza Weekend, Wajib) as a doctor whose late-night commute from Jericho to Ramallah takes a terrifying turn when her tire blows. Ali Suliman (200 Meters, The Attack) plays a mysterious man who comes to her aide, but it soon becomes apparent he is no good Samaritan.
Jordanian producer Rula Nasser at Imaginarium Films and France’s Salaud Morriset are also partners on the short which shot in Jordan. Sassine was in L.A. with the project, trying to close a $30,000 gap to complete post-production, following the short’s selection for Film Independent’s Fiscal Sponsorship program.
She is also developing Zagha’s long-gestated feature Weedistan as well as a new documentary by Eliane Raheb, whose Miguel’s War won the Teddy for best LGBTQ-themed feature film in 2021.
“I’m now rethinking whether I should launch the company in Lebanon, or another country… it feels more and more difficult to produce films there. We rebuild things from scratch again and again… we had the financial crisis in 2019, the explosion,” says Sassine.
“Just as I was getting used to this new world, this new Lebanon and starting to figure out how to make it work, we suddenly have this full-blown war, even if the Israelis don’t call it war, but it is. Suddenly, everything is off the table again.”
Akl, who is watching events unfold from afar while directing Netflix’s upcoming show House of Guinness in the UK, also wonders when she will return to work in her native Lebanon.
“We’re a whole group of dreamers who have gone through more than I thought could be possible in four years. Every time some something would happen, we’d feel like, okay, that’s the last straw… and now suddenly it’s World War Three. I don’t have time to experience one emotion, to then be experiencing another one,” she says.
Gianluca Chakra, CEO of Dubai-based MENA production and distribution company Front Row Filmed Entertainment, recalls how Lebanon was once a key market for his company, which buys films for the entire MENA region.
“Twenty-five years ago, Lebanon was the number one territory in the region, now it’s like the worst performing territory,” he says.
Raised mainly in Rome, Chakra has retained strong links with his late father’s native Lebanon, having started out in the film business in Beirut before moving to the Gulf.
He says the Lebanese film industry has been in trouble since the financial crisis of 2019, which brought together the perfect storm of the country’s foreign debt default, currency devaluation and the collapse of the banking sector as people rushed to withdraw deposits
The Lebanese pound has since fallen 98% in value against the dollar while the country’s GDP has sunk from a peak of $54.9B in 2018 to $17.94B in 2023.
Chakra says the currency devaluation combined with an acute cost of living crisis has decimated the local box office in Lebanon.
“They had to raise the ticket price, which is now close to $6m, while the majority of people have the equivalent of $70 a month. Who is going to go to the cinema and use 10% of their monthly income salary on a ticket?” he asks.
The downturn has also impacted subscriber numbers for streamers, which in turn means they are not investing in Lebanese content. He suggests this is an issue across the entire of the entire Levant region.
“Any time you mention something out of Jordan or Lebanon, whatever the streamer, they don’t care anymore,” he says. “It’s easier to make a Saudi film, even if it’s bad film, where they’ll get the viewership.”
He suggests this approach is shortsighted given the roughly 15 million-strong Lebanese diaspora scattered around the world, with big communities in Latin America, North America, the Gulf, France and the UK.
Chakra fears the ongoing pressures could destroy one of the most traditionally creative, liberal and politically daring film and TV cultures in the Middle East, where writers and directors regularly used to pushed boundaries.
“We risk missing out on the next Nadine Labaki or Ziad Doueri… there will be no more Perfect Strangers, Capernaum, West Beirut or The Insult,” he says.
Against this backdrop, some filmmakers are attempting to push on with their projects.
Documentarian and theatre director Zeina Daccache is continuing to develop a play inspired by her work running theatre groups inside Lebanese prisons, which she has also explored in award-winning documentaries including Scheherazade’s Diary (2013), The Blue Inmates (2021) and 12 Angry Lebanese: The Documentary (2009).
“It’s been six years of hell in Lebanon, starting with the economy, and losing all our money to the banks. We did the revolution, but that didn’t lead anywhere, and we’ve got the same corrupted state. There was no electricity, so everyone was on solar systems. Then no fuel for your car, or medicine for the elderly… It’s been thing, after thing, after thing,” she says.
The rising tensions in southern Lebanon in the wake of October 7, were yet another challenge, she says but like Sassine, Daccache had also recently gotten her head around Lebanon’s new normal.
“I decided I couldn’t just sit here paralyzed,” says Daccache, who had started to develop a play inspired by her friendship with a former Palestinian inmate, whom she worked with when he was inside, and rising local stand-up comedian Sam Ghazal.
“We started writing something beautiful. We are three generations: Yusuf is the older generation. Then, it’s me in my 40s. Then you have the young, stand-up comedian,” she says.
Daccache was hoping to open the play in Beirut next January. This is now in the air, but the trio continue to meet and film their interactions.
“I’d booked the theatre but don’t know whether there will be a play or not,” she says. “We would have been meeting to rehearse, but now we’re filming our exchanges about the situation. Being together makes us feel safe, makes us feel that we’re still doing something, absurdly enough,” she says.
Younes also has high hopes that So The Lovers Could Come Out Again will come to fruition, with shooting set for the UK rather than Middle East.
“We’re currently sharing the script with the stars and waiting for their feedback from the stars. Depending on their availability, we’re hoping to shoot around September 2025,” she says. “Post production will be between the Italy and France.”
As she considers her future moves in Cairo, Sassine suggests getting Lebanese films over the line is becoming an militant act.
“It feels more and more that our films are tools of resistance, resistance against the dehumanization of the Palestinian population, and now the Lebanese, and misinformation,” she says.
“Making a film exist and showing something that is fully authentic about our countries, where we’re suffering from issues like censorship, lack of financing, and challenges like securing shooting permits, has become some sort of a militant act.”
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