Director's Statement
I started shooting the film 3 years ago with a crew of mostly first-timers. The film was interrupted several times and so I would continue shooting every six months for a couple of days; the financial strain was burdening.... and I was falling apart at times. The project started with the internal fear and heaviness that I had felt due to post-war trauma after I returned to Beirut. It was in no way the physical war that had affected me: I had not lived it. But I could not ignore how mute and destroyed most of us are, despite the effort we put in denying and defying it all through our survival instincts.... but I also could not ignore that I was falling deep in love with the undying city. Some time later, when ‘another’ war broke out, I did remember the SOUND of it... It was haunting me everywhere I went, just like it does to the main character of the film: it has become our shadow and greatest enemy. Through different chapters that somehow represent several key dates in the perpetual conflict(s), I watch my characters lost and voiceless turning around in circles, still searching or waiting for a ‘no way’ out... indeed a ‘no way’ out, for they are not fallen angels, they are simple humans FALLING FROM EARTH and craving to stay in Beirut, where angels are reborn...
Read more about this topic: Falling From Earth
Famous quotes containing the words director and/or statement:
“He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
—Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)
“He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote ... takes on the character of divine revelation.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)