In Lebanon, family ties are very strong and so it is not unusual that a forty-year-old man is still living with his elderly mother in Tripoli. But when the woman leaves him, all that remains for the man is the city in which he grew up. As he desperately searches for somebody to keep him company, the man makes friends with a young boy and begins a relationship, based on text messaging, with a prostitute. In the end, he agrees to take in an Ethiopian waitress who doesn’t even speak his language, but who will end up helping him improve his life. “The driving force behind us wanting to make a feature film in Lebanon has always been a desire to attempt and make one that we had not yet seen come out of this region. We feel that, generally speaking, people from this region are sometimes treated in works of fiction more as victims of the world and their circumstances, and not really portrayed as people with normal lives. We mean [...] to highlight the fact that there are a range of inner workings and complexities of the society that often go unnoticed to the untrained eye”.
Biography
film director
Rania Attieh
Rania Attieh (Tripoli, Lebanon) and Daniel Garcia (TX, USA) have written and directed numerous short films, which have been presented at various international festivals and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Almost Brooklyn, winner of Best Short Fiction from the Brooklyn Art Council in 2008, was shot under the supervision of Abbas Kiarostami, while their first short film dedicated to the Middle East, Tripoli, Quiet, won the Black Pearl Award for best short film about the Middle East at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in 2009. Ok, Enough, Goodbye is their first feature-length film.
FILMOGRAFIA
filmografia essenziale/essential filmography
From the Parapet (cm, 2005), Almost Brooklyn (cm, 2008), Tripoli, Quiet (cm, 2009), Ok, Enough, Goodbye (2011).
Daniel Garcia
Cast
& Credits
regia, sceneggiatura, montaggio, produttori/directors, screenplay, film editing, producers
Rania Attieh, Daniel Garcia
fotografia, musica/cinematography, music
Daniel Garcia
scenografia/production design
Rania Attieh
costumi/costume design
Michel Georges
suono/sound
Quentin Chiappetta
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Daniel Arzrouni (il figlio/Son), Nadimé Attieh (la madre/Mother), Walid Ayoubi (Walid), Nawal Mekdad (la prostituta/Prostitute), Sablawork Tesfay (la cameriera/Waitress), Theodor Hakim (l’amico/Friend)
produzione, vendita all’estero/production, world sales
En Passant Films