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A Lebanese film on fear and Christian migration to Mars</span>
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<td class="blue3"><span class="links">Daily Star staff</span><br>
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<p class="articletext" align="justify">BEIRUT: "Cinema has always
been
a dream. Some dreams are broken. Others persevere," muses Philippe
Skaff. "You can't survive making art alone, so I've spent a good deal
of the last 20 years trying to build a place where art is possible."
Renowned in Beit Mery as the chief executive and creative officer of
the public relations and advertising firm Grey Worldwide Middle East
and North Africa, Skaff shot "Lesson Number Five," his first
non-ad-oriented film, in 2006. He wrote and directed the 20-minute
short, which stars Antoine Kerbaje, May Hariri and Mario Bassil. </p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">Last month the film walked
away from the Tangiers Festival of Mediterranean Short Film with the
Festival Grand Prize.</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">Depicted
by Skaff as a sociopolitical satire, "Lesson Number Five" looks in on a
peculiar regimen of English lessons an unnamed "Teacher" doles out to a
group of geriatric gentlemen in the town of Byblos. The main objective
is to secure a mythic green card, the mark of landed immigrant status
in the United States.</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">Though
their training has evidently been ongoing for some time, the gents have
only made it to the fourth lesson of their class. The film opens with
Teacher informing his charges that the fee they'll have to pay for
their green cards has just doubled. In the wake of the events of
September 11, 2001, he explains, Americans - indeed anyone who can
afford it - will soon be emigrating to the planet Mars. </p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">Migration
tends to be the province of the young, not the very old, so - though
the movie isn't funny in either subject matter or treatment - it seems
to be making use of comic inversion.</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">"The
film is full of symbols," says Skaff. "When there's a war, you only see
the old people. For these people to be wanting to leave, you know
things must be really bad. The people in this community are Christians
and Christians migrate out of fear, fear of fanaticism and transferal
of fanaticism from one side to the other. We're already seeing this.</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">"We
have the means and the technology to colonize Mars but the immigration
laws, that is to say the enforcement of the discrimination of these
laws, will be much more stringent. You see African stowaways on ships
heading to Europe but there'd be none of that if you were traveling to
Mars."</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">Tangiers isn't the
first prize for "Lesson Number Five." It also took the Best Short Film
Award at the Rome International Film Festival (not in the Italian
capital but in Rome, Georgia, deep in the American South). </p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">Skaff
says he has two more shorts in preparation. The first will be shot in
Sanaa, Yemen, and will be about the wars in the Middle East and North
Africa region, "especially the Palestinian cause." He hopes to start
shooting it in November. The third film will be about the culture of
terrorism.</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">He says he'd like to
release the three films as a trilogy. "That way they could be screened
in a normal theater."</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">"I'm not interested in
making a Lebanese movie," says Skaff. "I want to make movies about the
region.</p>
<p class="articletext" align="justify">"All
of this is leading to the making of a feature film. I hope to move from
three minutes to 30 minutes to 90 minutes. I've been writing and making
ads for 20 years. They're like tents. bedouin-like. Temporary. But with
short film and feature film, there is a permanence and an architecture
that can be appreciated." -<em><strong> The Daily Star</strong></em></p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Elias I. Muhanna
Arabic & Islamic Studies
Harvard University
6 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge MA, 02138
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:emuhanna@fas.harvard.edu">emuhanna@fas.harvard.edu</a></pre>
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