Direction Lebanon, where takes place until Monday, September 4, in Akkar, the isolated and rural north of the country, a festival which offers cinema and nature walks. This is the REEF, the Environmental and Film Meetings, housed in the former silk factory of Kobayat. The 5th edition is held despite the serious crisis in Lebanon. It will continue the following weekend with a second part in the Bekaa region.
Report by our correspondent in Kobayat,
On screen, the cartoon Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo and, in the audience, Lebanese children and young Syrian refugees in Akkar. The REEF festival, in the heart of Kobayat and its mountains, aims to be unifying, festive, a place of exchange, explains Antoine Daher, director of the festival:
” We are in the Akkar, and the region is unfortunately associated with poverty, remoteness from everything, especially culture. We give another image. It is a region that is beautiful in itself and where cultural things happen. It is precisely because there is the crisis that we must continue with this festival, we make people breathe a little. »
Among the films screened, Motherland, a highly acclaimed short film: the story of a generational break around the Lebanese revolt of 2019 and shattered family secrets. Bane Fakih, director:
” It interests me that different people from different cultures, different religions, see this film and feel something. Here, we are quite far from Beirut, and there is a bit of conservatism, which we can recognize – this conservatism – in the house I am talking about, and also the opposition to this conservatism, the difference, the nuances of people in the same family. »
To hold the festival, the challenges are not lacking, with the collapse of infrastructure, the power supply, the organization of transport to facilitate the arrival of the public, including from Beirut. The theme this year, “transformations”, sticks to the time of crisis. Eliane Raheb, artistic director:
” The world is changing, the problems of climate change… There are also all the wars that are in place, so these are also things that transform people. But also, we wanted to talk about the transformations in the positive side in Lebanon. With all the crisis that we had, there are small miracles that came out. »
Les petits miracles is this school of music created in Kobayat in 2019, and still standing… It is the creation that continues: after the depression of the past years, Hadi Zakkak, director and member of the jury, but also a teacher, sees among his film students, some of whom are in selection, a rebound:
” There is a kind of recovery. Two years ago, most wanted to leave immediately, and I think – more and more now – they know that it’s like Lebanon is a specimen of the whole world. It’s not just Lebanon that is in crisis, it’s a crisis of today’s world, of modernity itself. »
Also present, the Egyptian filmmaker Amal Ramses, who came to train women from Akkar in video. Their one-minute films, speaking in particular of freedom, are projected on the big screen. For the director, cultural initiatives are a form of resistance to the crises experienced by societies in the Middle East.