Yara
+Lebanon in Focus
Friday, 9/27
1:00 p.m.
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Yara
يارا
Abbas Fahdel
Narrative feature
101 min | 2018
Lebanon, Iraq, France
Arabic with English subtitles
Minnesota premiere
Yara lives alone with her grandmother in an isolated valley, most of whose inhabitants have died or emigrated abroad. One day, Yara meets a young stranger.
Described as a “tale of summer love unwinding against a background of almost Edenic beauty” (John Bleasdale of Sight & Sound) Yara might more accurately be described as the opposite: scenes of Edenic beauty unfolding against the background of summer love. Shot in the Kadisha Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in the north of Lebanon, an area that is accessible only by foot or by mule. The natural world is the true star of this film that weaves between two related stories: young love and the story of a small community of mountain farmers condemned to disappear.
Festivals and Awards:
Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, 2018
AFI FEST, US, 2018
Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Argentina, 2018
Gijón International Film Festival, Spain, 2018
Abbas Fahdel, born in Babylon, Iraq, in 1959, studied cinema in France under the direction of Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, and Serge Daney. He has directed three documentaries, including Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015), which won the Grand Prix in Visions du Réel and the Doc Alliance Selection Award in Locarno. Yara is his second fiction feature film after Dawn of the World in 2008.
