Sleepless Nights with Director
Saturday 11/08 at St. Anthony Main Theatre 8:30pm | get tickets >>>
DISCUSSION with director Eliane Raheb
Synopsis:
Who would sleep worse, the victimizer or the victim? Director Eliane Raheb mines the psychical depths of the fraught, irrevocable connection between these two positions. At its surface, the documentary is a suspenseful investigative report, linking the lives of two people: the mother of a 15-year-old Popular Guard communist militia member, missing since the 1982 Lebanese Civil War, and an ex-intelligence officer with the right-wing Lebanese Forces at the time. The officer admitted publicly to his atrocities, but can he tell the mother what she needs to know? Lensed evocatively, scored poignantly, Sleepless Nights portrays both characters with equal depth.
2012
128 minutes
Documentary feature
Directed by: Eliane Raheb
Language: Arabic, French, English
Country: Lebanon
Website | Trailer
“It’s hard to find a Lebanese documentary that doesn’t touch on the country’s bloody civil war, yet it’ll be even harder to find one better than ‘Sleepless Nights.’ Helmer Eliane Raheb’s emotionally trenchant pic slices through fuzzy notions of forgiveness and reconciliation, exposing the concept of clemency without justice as a mask that protects the perpetrators and leaves survivors with festering wounds.” (link)
Festivals and Awards:
-LatinArab Film Festival: winner of best film
-Dubai International Film Festival: official selection
-True-False Film Festival: official selection
-Birds Eye View Festival (London): Best Documentary award
-Ismailia Film Festival: Critics’ Choice for best film
-FIDADOC Film Festival (Aghadir): Human Rights award
Filmmaker bio (from received materials):
Eliane Raheb was born in Lebanon and is the director of two short films—“The Last Screening” and “Meeting,” and of the documentaries Karib Baiid (So Near Yet So Far), Intihar (Suicide) and Hayda Lubnan (This Is Lebanon), which received the Excellency Award at the Yamagata Film Festival and was broadcast on ARTE/ZDF/ Al Jadeed and NHK. Layali Bala Noom (Sleepless Nights) is her first feature documentary.
