Five years after his first film, “All This Victory,” won the Grand Prix and the Audience Award at the Critics’ Week in Venice, Lebanese director Ahmed Ghossein is preparing to shoot his next film. The director’s sophomore effort, Side Effects of Trust in Life, was selected as part of this year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Agora Crossroads co-production forum, where it received the Midpoint Consulting Award.
Ghossein said: “The new film is challenging because of what is happening in Lebanon, but I wrote it before anything else.” diverseA reference not only to the current war with Israel, but also to the turmoil the country has faced in the past five years. “In 2019, Lebanon completely collapsed – economically, politically and socially. It was an example of how capitalism and neoliberalism fail. If you want to look at the banking system and how it is failing around the world, just look at Beirut. That image was very powerful and I found myself in survival mode, which inspired dark humor.
“Side Effects of Confidence in Life” revolves around Lama, a young woman who begins to suffer from hearing problems due to panic attacks after losing her job during the economic crisis in Lebanon. After being medically advised to avoid anxiety-provoking situations, she returns to her home village but is soon brought back to Beirut and into the center of an escalating series of crazy events. The film was produced by the Lebanese company Ababout Productions, and co-produced by the German company Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion and the Norwegian film company DUO.
Ghossein said in a statement to his manager that Lama, like him, “becomes helpless after losing her job, and witnesses the city’s deterioration while others search for escape.” In Beirut, nothing works, there is no electricity, water or money. We are prisoners of this inability.” According to Ghossein, the film will be intensively designed and will give viewers a concrete idea of the chaos that fictional Beirut is experiencing.
After producing a film about the war between Hezbollah and Israel with “All That Victory,” Ghossein vowed “never to make a film about war again” but he could not look away from the situation in his homeland. “The truth is that two months after I left Venice, the revolution started, then Covid, then the war, so I didn’t have the space to absorb what was happening. We need time as filmmakers and we need space. I need to live to write.”
As the conflicts between Lebanon and Israel continue to escalate, the director is not entirely sure he is “ready” to start his next film. “The situation is still very tense, and sometimes you feel that filmmaking is not important. If you ask me now: Is cinema important? No, there is a war in my country. The priority is to help people.”
“People want topics from us, not cinema,” Ghossein continued, thinking about the expectations placed on Arab filmmaking, especially in times of conflict. “They want stories of social drama, and they see us as subjects. “They want to see a Middle East that the West understands.”
Ghossein continued: “Cinema is a global language, but there is pressure because the money ultimately comes from Europe.” “Things are changing in the Arab world, we have a lot of new co-productions, funding and grants, but there is no freedom yet. Nowadays, there are producers in the European market who want to understand more, even if the word ‘understanding’ irritates me a little.”
Regarding moving his latest project to Thessaloniki, Ghossein said that there is a natural synergy between Greece and Lebanon, and that he is happy to cooperate with local partners who understand the details of work in Arab projects. “The Side Effects of Trusting Life” will reunite Ghossein with “All This Victory”‘s Greek editor, Yannis Chalkiadakis, plus the director is open to the idea of filming Greece in Beirut.
“The Greek producers offered to shoot the film here if we cannot film next year,” Ghossein said. “But if there is a war in Lebanon, I will not film anything because I cannot shift my focus and film to Greece as if nothing is happening in my home country. This is impossible.
The director said co-productions are still highly desirable because there are “grants, discounts and producers interested in working together.” A possible solution is to shoot half the film in Lebanon and half in Greece, but although Ghossein is open to this possibility, he is saddened by having to move production far from his home country. “Space will tell you one thing, and it will speak to you in a different way. In the end, I am loyal to space and to my country.”