Randa Chahal Sabag - Themes

Themes

Sabag began her career with documentary films but shifted to feature films by the 1990s, though she retained ‘a documentary-maker's nose for contentious subject matter’. She is reported to have said,“You discover in my films a common denominator. You notice that the camera only moves from right to left exactly like Arabic writing.”

Les Infidèles, a 1997 drama, is about the relationship between a French diplomat and a former Islamist who agrees to turn over the names of his colleagues if the French government will release an imprisoned friend.

Civilisées (A Civilized People) released in 1999, is a black comedy about the Lebanese Civil War, which killed at least 100,000 people. Sabag deployed a ‘vaudevillian cast’ including foreign servants and philanthropists, visiting expatriates, militiamen and criminals - in a profane and disunified story mixing elements of absurdist plays. Some 40 minutes of the film was censored for its ‘obscenity’ and ‘uncomplimentary representation of Lebanon during this particularly unsavory spell of its history’. It was subsequently screened only once, at the Beirut International Film Festival.

Sabag became noted in 2003 with The Kite, which received the Silver Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival and won several prestigious prizes and international acclaim; the Grand Special Jury Prize, the Cinema for Peace Award and the Laterna Magica Prize. Set in a low-key South Lebanese village, the film is about love, life, death and the absurdity of the Israeli occupation, seen from the perspective of a Druze family separated following the division of their village into two with one half annexed to Israel. The story evolves around an arranged marriage between Lamia, a 16-year-old Lebanese Druze girl, (played by Flavia Bechara) and her Israeli Druze cousin (played by Maher Bsaibes). The drama unfolds under the vigilant yet impotent Israeli-Lebanese border guards; one of whom is played by renowned Lebanese composer, actor and playwright Ziad Rahbani. The Kite is used ‘as a metaphor for love and for life at the border’, it explores, with depth and sometimes humor, 'the meaning of brides, of the hope they represent for divided families and, sometimes, for divided nations'.

In 2005, Sabag started a new project with the distinguished Lebanese-American Hollywood film-producer Elie Samaha. With the working title Too Bad for Them, the film is expected to combine comedy, music, dancing as well as politics, and North-South socio-economic disparities. However, the film was unreleased at the time of her death.