Hello.
So as you know,
my comfort zone isn’t here.
It’s usually on set,
behind a camera,
like him,
or him.
But I’m very happy to be here.
So yes, I was born in Beirut, Lebanon.
It’s what I call my home country.
It’s the place
where my first memories are,
where my parents live,
where my first loves are,
my first heartbreaks.
I’ve lived in other places
and I’ve made them home,
like New York,
which I’ve fallen in love with --
and in.
But I always felt
like my biggest strength
came from the fact that I knew
exactly where I came from.
And that knowledge
was very important to me
because it really defines
who I am as a woman.
But growing up in Lebanon
comes with a price.
I think this tension and this --
what I have between my home country
is something I cherish
but it’s also a burden,
because Lebanon is a place
with a very contradicting soul.
It’s a place filled with chaos and poetry;
a place where hope and despair coexist
in really strange ways.
It’s also a place where joy
and sorrow are inseparable,
like Khalil Gibran --
in one of my favorite poems
by our national poet,
Khalil Gibran mentions “that well
from which comes our laughter
is also the one that hosts our tears.”
And I think today, more than ever,
this is true in Lebanon,
because after everything that happened,
it feels like a land of broken dreams,
but filled with so many
dreams nonetheless.
And growing up in Lebanon,
we were constantly
on the verge of the worst.
We felt like that silence
between [one] crisis and the other
was almost more agonizing
than the crisis itself.
And that really defined us
as human beings,
because we really live every day
as if it were our last,
and that’s in the best
and the worst kind of ways.
I think this is where
the screenwriter in me was born:
at home in Lebanon,
in the streets at home
and the house I grew up in,
because I became fascinated
with human flaws and vulnerabilities
and the truth that comes out of us
in times of crisis
and when we’re put under pressure.
And when at home,
when I saw the people I loved the most,
my parents,
be real,
I felt free somehow.
It wasn’t always pretty
but at least it felt safe,
like this is a place
where we can be ourselves.
But in 2020,
when the pandemic hit the planet,
we all started questioning
what home meant.
My parents were architects --
are architects,
so they also added to what I felt home
was to my definition of home.
Because before following
my own dreams --
being a filmmaker --
I was a good daughter,
a good girl,
and I followed my father’s dreams
and I studied architecture and finished.
And what I learned in architecture school
is how much you can learn about people,
about their story,
about societies through the spaces
that they inhabit,
through every object,
every frame, every wall,
through the ground,
through the streets.
But what do you do
when you feel like the ground
on which you’re standing might not hold?
In the world of today,
filled with political instability,
climate disasters, where our spaces
are constantly ravaged and threatened,
how do you create a sense of home?
In 2020 when the pandemic hit,
we all felt --
or at least those of us
lucky enough to have homes --
we all went inside,
and that became our safe space.
The outside world became the threat:
the air, the people.
This invisible monster was outside.
But as long as you were
tucked in your bubble,
you were safe.
And I’m talking about those of us
who are lucky enough not to live
locked with an abuser,
victims of domestic abuse.
So for those of us,
the safe bubble was inside.
Or so we thought.
On August 4, 2020 in Lebanon,
our lives changed.
In a split of a second,
one of the largest non-nuclear
explosions pulverized our port
and destroyed half our city,
killing many people
and destroying homes
and creating losses
that we can’t even count until today.
And there still hasn’t been
accountability for what happened,
even though it was the result of years
of political mismanagement and corruption.
I happened, on that day, to be in Beirut:
in the center of Beirut,
in the office,
because I was in pre-production
for my first feature film,
“Costa Brava, Lebanon,”
a film we had been working on
for a few years really hard,
and a film that, ironically, is the story
of a family that decides to leave Beirut,
a place that doesn’t feel safe
to them anymore
to create a utopic mountain home,
a self-sustainable mountain home
away from a city
that has broken their hearts.
This is the cast of the film.
And then what happens
is that their utopia
is completely destroyed
when the government decides
to build an illegal garbage landfill
right outside their home,
bringing that reality
to their front door --
the one they have been
running away from for many years.
The family finds itself
again confronted to this destruction
that it had been trying to avoid,
facing everything it was trying
to protect itself from.
I was with the crew, the cast
and the crew of the film
in the office in Gemmayze in Beirut,
when at six or seven,
in the split of a second,
our lives were turned upside down.
We went from a creative meeting
filled with passion and love
and excitement
to looking for each other under rubble,
wondering if we had all made it alive.
Luckily, we did,
and we were much luckier
than a lot of people in the same street.
My cinematographer, Joe,
almost lost his eye
and everyone was injured.
We got out of the street
and realized that the explosion
was not just next to the office,
but everywhere,
and that’s when we understood
how big it was.
Walking down the street like zombies
around that time,
surrounded by broken,
confused, stunned faces,
felt like walking in the set of a movie
I don’t want to direct or be a part of.
Everyone’s homes,
their private spaces,
their frames, their walls,
were dust on which we were walking.
We stopped everything at that moment
because we lost all of our coordinates:
all of our sense of home,
everything that we had worked for.
So what we did is we just took
a moment for two months
and each of us took time to grieve,
to assess the losses,
whether it was the office or all of us.
Anyway, how can you even think
about being creative
or making anything
at a moment where you feel
like you’re living hell --
in the middle of hell?
You cannot create amidst such chaos.
At that moment,
my mother --
my hero on that day
because it’s only thanks to her
that some of us made it to a hospital,
who has lived civil wars --
reminded me of a book I read
in architecture school.
“Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino.
I’ll read to you the quote
that she read to me at that time
when she saw the despair
me and my team were in.
“The hell of the living
is not something that will be.
If there is one,
it is what is already here,
the hell we live every day,
that we make by being together.
There are two ways to escape suffering it.
The first is easy for many:
accept the hell,
and become such a part of it
that you can no longer see it.
The second is risky
and demands constant vigilance
and apprehension:
seek and learn to recognize who and what,
in the midst of hell, are not hell,
then make them endure,
give them space.”
Luckily, these people
were not too far from me.
There were the cast
and the crew of this film,
so we met all together and brainstormed.
We thought, should we make
this film or not?
It seemed crazy to make anything
around that time in Lebanon
because the country
was experiencing, until now,
its worst economic crisis
since its inception,
the loss and the destruction
and the PTSD we were
all going through after the explosion
and also the global pandemic,
which was hitting the country really hard,
which we had almost forgotten about
because of everything else
that was happening.
But at a moment where existing
felt like an act of resistance,
we felt like making this movie
was very important,
because it would mean regaining agency --
to regain agency
and feel like they haven't
taken everything from us.
And as Maya Angelou says,
there’s nothing more agonizing
than an untold story
hanging inside of you --
not directly quoting.
And I think we really needed
to regain a sense of order,
find our coordinate,
a sense of home.
And like after World War I,
a lot of European artists
went back into classicism,
trying to run away
from this feeling of destruction
that the war had brought in
and stepped away from
the experimentalism that came before,
I think we used creativity
to rebuild those pillars and that order.
So it was a crazy decision,
but we did it because we wanted to
and because something was driving us.
So we went and made the film
against all odds.
And it was hard,
it was filled with obstacles,
but it was beautiful,
because at a moment
where we had missed human connection
and at a moment where our societies
are becoming more fragile and loveless,
we were able to recreate
a moment of warmth,
of love and magic,
at a moment where it was hard to find any.
And I think that that was very special
because telling the story
together gave us ...
a sense of home again.
It felt like the set became
that safe space,
that family.
And it was as real and as raw
as the home I was telling you about.
Because we were all filled with creativity
and a desire to make something,
but we are also grieving and broken.
So that was me again,
realizing the beauty of being surrounded
by people as real as me,
even if it was not always pretty,
but it was real.
And I think that courage and --
we were always told to go to that place
that is the place of great pain
because it’s also a place
of great inspiration.
I think that it’s easy to hear and to say,
but it’s really hard to achieve.
I think that courage to go there,
to go where it hurts
when you’re so broken,
came to me from those people,
this cast and crew
that really, really gave me the courage
to want to tell the story
and reminded me of the importance of it.
And I want to mention
also those two girls.
I actually have twins
who played the role of Rim,
the protagonist of the film,
and they both shared the role.
And I think working with them
was a great learning experience for me,
because that’s the beauty
of being a filmmaker.
You work with people from different ages
and different backgrounds all the time,
and working with them,
for all of us on set,
was a reminder of the importance
of remaining hopeful
and keeping the sense of wonder,
especially for their generation.
Because whatever world
we’re fighting for today,
they will be able to benefit from.
And so I know that we all deal with loss
and rebuilding a home that we lost
in different ways.
For me, it was through human connection
and understanding that it wasn't
necessarily a space anymore.
And I think for you
it might be something else.
We all channel that in different ways.
But for me,
that moment of joy, of sorrow, of freedom,
of creativity,
that moment between
the “action” and the “cut,”
that’s what felt like home.
And I’m very grateful for that.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)