Enora Maurer

Personal enjoyment: ★★★★★
Lebanon
Director: Nadine Labaki
Starring: Zain Al Rafeea (Zain), Yordanos Shiferaw (Rahil), Boluwatife Treasure Bankole (Yonas), Kawthar Al Haddad (Souad), Fadi Kamel Youssef (Selim), Nour el Husseini (Assadd), Cedra Izam (Sahar)
Genre: Drama
Running time: 123 minutes

Nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, and I understand why. This movie is truly moving. The main characters, I learned, were performed by first time actors and beautifully so.

Of course, the story is heavy – I’m glad I didn’t see it in the morning before Uni (which is why I missed it in regular cinemas and had to pay my ticket in an artsy one, where the UGC illimité doesn’t work).

The ticket was well worth it, I am extremely glad I still got to see it, as this movie – its story and its characters – will stay with me. It’s real, heartbreaking and at the same time beautiful. Actually, it reminded me a bit of Dorothea Lange’s photography, of which I recently saw an exhibition ; she manages to capture difficult, even miserable life conditions through powerful and beautiful portraits of people, without merely focusing on the documentary aspect of their life, but rather on their person, and their humanity.