Visions du Réel Lebanese Doc ‘We Are Inside’ Debuts Trailer: ‘It’s About Change in My Father, in Me, in My Country’ (EXCLUSIVE)
12.04.2024 - 21:11
/ variety.com
Annika Pham
Seven years after showcasing “You Make a Better Window Than You Do a Door” at Visions du Réel’s Short Film competition strand, Lebanese-born Farah Kassem is back in Nyon, this time in the main international competition with her doc feature-length debut “We Are Inside.” Variety was granted access to the trailer. The film was produced by the helmer’s regular collaborator Cynthia Choucair of Lebanon’s Road2Films, in co-production with Qatar’s Al Jazeera Documentary Channel and Denmark’s Good Company Pictures (“Photographer of War,” “Beautiful Something Left Behind”).
The seven-year gap since Kassem started working on “We Are Inside” was a transformative period for her and her native country as she underscored in a statement. “I witnessed, among others things a sense of deterioration and destruction, that will be very difficult to come back from.
We’ve witnessed a revolution, the 4th of August Beirut explosion, the on-going massacres in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon,” said the filmmaker, now established in Brussels. On a personal level, Kassem lost her beloved father Mustapha, a renowned poet.
But his fierce personality and joie de vivre live on through the filmmaker’s 2012 short “My Father Looked Like Abdel Nasser” (in which Mustapha struggles with the loss of his wife) and now “We Are Inside.” In it, Kassem comes back to Tripoli, Lebanon, after a 15 year-absence, to stay with her father whose health is fast declining. There, as she tries to reconnect with him, she quickly grasps that poetry is the key to his heart and soul.
“I understood that poetry was his way to deal with my mother’s loss, to grief his country, and to stay alive,” she tells Variety. In the intimacy of her father’s small flat, the father
.