[LCM Articles] A Lebanese film on fear and Christian migration to Mars

[Elias Muhanna]

A Lebanese film on fear and Christian migration to Mars
Daily Star staff

 

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.

Last month the film walked away from the Tangiers Festival of 
Mediterranean Short Film with the Festival Grand Prize.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

"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."

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).

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.

He says he'd like to release the three films as a trilogy. "That way 
they could be screened in a normal theater."

"I'm not interested in making a Lebanese movie," says Skaff. "I want to 
make movies about the region.

"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." -/* The Daily Star*/


-- 
Elias I. Muhanna
Arabic & Islamic Studies
Harvard University
6 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge MA, 02138
emuhanna at fas.harvard.edu

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/lebanon-articles/attachments/20070718/98b17cb3/attachment.htm