Denis Lavant and Eva Mendes in a still from Leos Carax’s 1986 feature ‘Mauvais Sang’ (Bad Blood), which will be projected at IF on June 16. (Credit: Courtesy Maskoon)
BEIRUT — Myriam Sassine is still busy. For the past year or more, the film producer, a board member of the Fondation Liban Cinema (FLC), has been implementing an EU-funded initiative that saw the creation of FLC’s Lebanese Film Fund.
The fund was unveiled last November in parallel with the launch of a film producers training course that FLC created in partnership with ESA Business School.
This week, she’s pulling the strings of a more public film event.
“This local film industry day is the closing event of the FLC initiative,” Sassine says. “We’ll present the assisted film projects and the supported producers. Those who aren’t in Lebanon will send videos.”
Sassine, who’s also the director of Maskoon Fantastic Film Festival, and her collaborators wanted to make the final installment of this film production scheme a bit less insular. To open up the event to Lebanon’s film professionals, they scheduled a round of Maskoon talks around various film market themes.
Juliet Binoche in a still from Leos Carax’s 1986 feature ‘Mauvais Sang’ (Bad Blood), which will be projected at IF on June 15. (Credit: Courtesy Maskoon)
Sassine and Evrim Ersoy, the artistic director of LA’s Beyond film festival and a board member and consultant of Maskoon, will moderate the talks.
“We don’t know anymore who’s still here who’s not here,” Sassine says of Beirut’s filmmaking scene, “whether new companies have opened or not, so we decided to make this a networking event.”
In addition to the 100-odd professionals expected to participate, “we’re encouraging film students to come. It will be a good way to meet filmmakers and maybe land an on-set internship.”
To make the event palatable to the public, several film projections will be staged in parallel to the industry talks.
French writer-director Leos Carax is scheduled to be in Beirut June 15-17. (Credit: Courtesy Maskoon)
“We wanted to do a small Maskoon event this year,” Sassine says, “so we thought of combining [it with the production event]. Doing them in parallel allowed us to combine our efforts and bring Leos Carax.”
For the discerning public, Carax will bring star power to the proceedings. The writer-director will introduce a pair of his classic films before projection of at Institut Français — Mauvais Sang (“Bad Blood, 1986”) on June 15 and Holy Motors (2012) on June 16 — and participate in Maskoon talks at Sursock Museum on June 17.
Before Lebanon’s current dysfunctions, it wasn’t unheard of for internationally lauded filmmakers to turn up in Beirut. Most came to sit on a festival jury, though occasionally a Lebanon-curious star materialized for a local premiere, as Catherine Deneuve did in October 2008 for Je veux voir.
“Carax [is] a bit fascinated by Lebanon,” says Sassine. “I met him at a festival. We chatted a bit and he told me that he would love to come to Lebanon one day. I told him I would invite him when I find the right opportunity. And that was it.”
She says Carax’s oeuvre is well suited to Maskoon.
“He’s a director who always relied on bringing fantasy into realism, who works with the surreal and the absurd. He’s a filmmaker that encapsulates this capacity to make very radical auteur films, which can also be completely fantastical. This is something we’re encouraging in Maskoon.”
FLC’s Grant-winning projects will be unveiled on June 16, as will the producers who participated in the FLC-ESA training course. That afternoon, the talks will commence with Front Row Filmed Entertainment’s Gianluca Chakra chatting with Ersoy about how Front Row diversified from film distribution to production. Following this, Sassine will discuss the ins and outs of micro-budget film production with producers Lara Abou Saifan and Christelle Younes as well as veteran director Elie Khalifé.
Carax will be in the hot seat with Sassine on the morning of June 17, reflecting on the role of the fantastical in works like Mauvais Sang, 1986, Holy Motors, 2012, and his most-recent release Annette, 2021.
A still from the Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s ‘Rebel,’ which will be projected at Sursock Museum on June 17. (Credit: Courtesy Maskoon)
“Even his most [realist] films, like The Lovers on the Bridge, have grand fantasy sequences,” Sassine says. “So we’re going to talk about his career while focusing on genre, to see how a filmmaker of this stature understands and treats genre, and adapts it to his own vision of cinema.”
That afternoon, Ersoy, Chakra, and Maskoon artistic director Antoine Waked will discuss how genre film has disseminated through the MENA region’s cinema.
“It will focus on the recent successes — both festival successes and commercial successes — in Arab genre cinema and discuss the possibility and possible outcomes of making genre films these days.”
In the evening Ersoy returns to the moderator’s chair for a conversation with DB Studios cofounder Rana Eid. The sound designer and filmmaker will share her insights about the integral place of sound in genre film, reflecting on her recent work on Evil Dead Rise (2023) and the action-thriller Rebel (2022) which premiered at last year’s Cannes to some acclaim.
Rebel, directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, will be projected at Sursock Museum later that evening.
Talks and projections around Maskoon Talks will be staged June 15-17 at Institut Français and Sursock Museum.
