Contents

12
13
P 14 | Alissar Caracalla
P 20 | Anachar Basbous
P 26 | Anissa Helou
P 32 | Bernard Khoury
P 38 | Elie Gharzouzi
P 44 | Flavia Codsi
P 50 | Georges Chakra
P 56 | Guy Manoukian
P 62 | Hany Tamba
P 68 | Hiba Al-Kawas
P 74 | Hussein Madi
P 80 | Iman Humaydan
P 86 | Jean-Claude Boulos
P 92 | Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
P 98 | Khaled Mouzanar
P 104 | Maria Hibri & Hoda Baroudi
P 110 | Michel Eléftériadès
P 116 | Nabil Dada
P 122 | Nabil Gholam
P 128 | Nada Debs
P 134 | Nada Ghazal
P 140 | Nadine Labaki
P 146 | Philippe Skaff
P 152 | Rabih Kayrouz
P 158 | Rabih Mroué
P 164 | Roger Moukarzel
P 170 | Sarah Beydoun & Sarah Nhouli
P 176 | Zuhair Murad
 Nadine Labaki
Secret Dreamer
140
141
 1> Still from the film Caramel, 2007
© May Farra

Secret Dreamer
142

N
143 adine Labaki’s recollections
unspool as a series of vibrant
images and stories. She is not so
much remembering as sifting through
filmstrips preserved in her mind, splicing
them together to form a more coherent
picture of the life she now leads.
“For me, filmmaking is also about self-
expression,” she says, twisting a purple
hair band around one finger as she
explains why she must write in order to
direct. “It’s about you wanting to express
something that you feel… or a story you
want to tell.”
laughing she throws a handful of cards
into the air.
It was a new experience, Nadine says, for
women to see themselves in a figure who
was “cute, spontaneous, trendy, at ease…
not self-conscious at all.” The video created
a stir, and it became a huge success.
“It was a sort of therapy for me at the
same time,” Nadine adds. “Maybe that’s
why also, I wrote a film about women,
because it was something that I needed
to do, to understand more things about
myself.”

“This waxing thing, this caramel, it becomes
like a sort of witness to these women’s
stories and secrets.”
Seated in a colorful, quilted armchair at
the center of the loft apartment she
shares with her husband, the musician
and film composer Khaled Mouzanar,
Nadine’s appealing, childlike qualities
shine through her womanly features: in
particular, an unselfconscious candour
and vulnerability.
Her face is internationally recognizable
thanks to Caramel – the 2007 film that
she co-wrote, directed, and starred in –
but there is something in her modest
deportment and gentle voice that
suggests she could make herself invisible
if she wanted.
In Nadine’s films, vivid details and
experiences evoke intangible ideas,
sensations, and longings. Her 2003 music
video to “Akhasmak Ah,” (‘I Taunt You’)
introduced themes that are central to her
later work. Pop star Nancy Ajram plays a
waitress who dances, flirts, and plays
cards with the clientele of a traditional
Egyptian café. Men cheer as Nancy tosses
and fluffs a luscious mane of dark curls;
Set in the present day, the film, Caramel
(‘Sukkar Banat’), tells several, interlinked
stories enacted in and around a Beirut
beauty parlor. It is one of the first
contemporary Lebanese films not to
revolve around the country’s Civil War.
Nadine’s memories of her mother and
the neighbors gathering in their kitchen
for a waxing ritual inspired the film’s
dominant motif – the thick, heated paste
of sugar, lemon juice, and water is equally
a means to pain, pleasure, and beauty.
“This waxing thing, this caramel, it
becomes like a sort of witness to these
women’s stories and secrets,” she says.
The film begins at the layer that the wax
exposes and makes its way inwards.
During Nadine’s childhood, war often
forced her to stay home and it indirectly
sharpened her powers of observation.
She most looked forward to turning on
the television, even before the color bars
dissolved into images in the late
afternoon. >

Secret Dreamer
144
145 >“Life for me became a little bit boring,”
she recalls. “Watching films was my only
escape.”
Nadine’s and her younger sister
Caroline’s mutual attachment to film
echoes their father’s youthful aspirations.
An electrical engineer by trade, he spent
many pleasant hours in the small movie
theater that his father once operated in
their building in Baabdat.
Even during the family's three-year
sojourn in Canada, Mr. Labaki often
talked with his two girls (now both
directors) about how much he loved
visiting the projection booth just to smell
the rolls of film.
“I never saw it,” Nadine says of the
“Maybe that's why also, I wrote a film theater. “I don’t even have pictures of it.
It’s just an idea that I have, an image in
about women, because it was something my head.” Her decision to make films
that I needed to do, to understand more materialized in much the same way – an
about myself.” ethereal image floating in developing
solution until, once fully exposed, it
pointed her toward an audiovisual degree
at Beirut’s Université Saint-Joseph.
The program pushed Nadine and her
peers to experiment across the medium:
“Go and make a film, go and make a
documentary, go and make a music
video.” Directing instantly felt natural to
her. In acting class, though, Nadine hid
so the teacher wouldn’t notice her and
ask her to perform.
Later, that changed. “There was a click
somewhere, and I understood that it was
interesting also to be able to become
someone else for a while,” she says. “It’s
the only legitimate place where you can
1> Still from the film Caramel, 2007
© May Farra
experiment on this level, and when I
discovered that, I started to enjoy it.”
The first short film she directed (also her
diploma project) played out in one 13-
minute shot as viewers looked through
the scope of the main character’s rifle and
into the lives of his neighbors.
The film, 11 Rue Pasteur, won several
international prizes, including best
short film at the 1997 Beirut Film
Festival, and gave Nadine confidence.
But, she didn’t feel that she had the
maturity or the experience to work
immediately as a filmmaker.
Instead, she found a job as a television
producer at an advertising agency. After
two and a half years, she went freelance
directing ads, and a friend persuaded her
to bring her own ideas to the music
video industry. “It’s very tempting to say
yes to advertising, to say yes to music
videos,” Nadine says. “So, I was very lazy,
and I wouldn’t start writing until I met
my producer.”
In 2004, a mutual friend introduced
Nadine to French producer Anne-
Dominique Toussaint, then in Beirut to
present a film at the annual European
Film Festival. After Anne-Dominique
left, she began writing Nadine e-mails,
prodding her to put something down
on paper.
On Anne-Dominique’s advice, Nadine
applied and was accepted as a resident
by the Cannes Film Festival’s
Cinefondation. She spent six months in
Paris developing “this idea of women in
a beauty institute.”
 2> Poster photo for Caramel, 2007
© May Farra

Anne-Dominique would often visit her room to check on her

progress. “I never gave her something to read,” Nadine says. “I
would just tell her the story and act the story. And she liked it,
and, you know, when I finished, she said, ‘Yes, I’m in.’”

On returning to Beirut, Nadine continued writing with two

good friends, Jihad Hojeily and Rodney El Haddad. “It’s like
Ping-Pong,” she says, explaining her preference for
collaboration. “You have people who respond, react to what
you say. You react to what they’re saying. I think it’s a very
healthy way of working.”

When it came time to cast the film, she went looking for
first-time performers. “I wanted to experiment with reality,”
she says. “That’s why I chose people who are not actors. I
didn’t ask them to act. I just wanted them to be themselves
in certain situations.”

The choice sheds light on an important aspect of Nadine’s

character. Her own inner life also acts as a mirror reflecting
the hidden depths of those around her; she longs to see what’s
beneath the surface.

“When I meet new people, I start imagining their life – how

they are when they’re at home – and wondering if they’re
happy or not,” she says.

The July 2006 war started a week after the film shoot finished.
Traveling to France for the post-production, Nadine felt like
a traitor. “You’re leaving everybody behind to work on a film
that did not talk about war,” she says. “It spoke about women
and colors and warmth and Beirut on a sunny day.”

Within days of Caramel’s debut at Cannes, it had sold to over

30 countries. A few months later, Nadine married the film’s
composer in a forest between their home villages.

The two of them have been traveling from festival to festival,

but Nadine is already at work with the same collaborators
on a new screenplay. The whirl is an apt metaphor for how
to move forward once you have an idea of where you’re
headed – at a brisk pace and looking back only so as to
better grasp the future. ■
 Flavia Codsi
Ripe Ideas
44
J
45 ust outside of her bedroom stands
one of Flavia Codsi’s few self-
portraits, a five-panel, life-size,
canvas standing screen entitled Privé
(‘Privacy,’ 1995).
Each of three panels shows a different
view of the same tall woman, wearing
blue jeans and a black bra and holding
up a white sheet. No matter which way
she turns, the sheet conceals the part of
her body that faces the viewer, forming
a subtle optical illusion. The woman’s
long dark hair spills down over
shoulders glowing with life. Her face,
characteristically, also remains hidden.
The work’s maturity of style and bold
colors suggest an artist who is
increasingly deliberate in her choices,
even as Flavia’s ambiguous pose and
manner – equal parts shy and teasing –
capture the thrilling uncertainty of the
period that inspired them, the transition
from anonymity to expectation.
By the time she completed the portrait,
Flavia had already won prizes two years
running at the prestigious Sursock
Museum’s Salon D’Automne in Beirut,
and the following year, she won a third.
Her admirers were pressing her to
mount a solo exhibition.
That idea wouldn’t come to fruition
until 2003, “because my technique was
so slow and it needed time,” Flavia says.
For a while, she and her younger
brother Fulvio, also a painter, shared a
stand in art shows, gradually building
a niche for themselves with mini-
exhibitions that required less financial
and emotional risk.
More than a decade and two successful
solo exhibitions later, Flavia retains a
healthy skepticism of public veneration
and a strong sense of her roots. “I
didn’t go to art school,” she explains. “I
didn’t decide to become a painter and
go to the ‘Beaux Arts’ and take courses
for years. It’s just a talent that I had, and
which I developed.”
A distinctive wariness radiates from her
strong face as she reflects on the many
phases she passed through on the road
from a child’s unmeditated pleasure in her
own talent to an adult’s willingness to
submit to the rigors of a full-time vocation.
The daughter of a popular tour guide-
turned-optician of Italian and Greek
descent and a housewife, both amateur
artists, Flavia learned perspective and
pragmatism from her father. While he
napped, she drew, knowing he’d give
her pocket money for her work. “So, I
used to make as many drawings as I
could,” she recalls.
Awake, he’d encourage her to see objects
around her as an artist would: a table has
four equal-sized legs in reality, of course,
but on paper the same table might have
two long legs and two short ones.
As a child, she painted only when the
mood struck or when, a few years later,
she had the chance to accompany the
well-known watercolor artist David
Kourani, a family friend, into nature.
“He used to give me paint brushes and
old paint,” Flavia says. “And he used to
show me some techniques, effects.”
She spent the summers of her childhood>

Ripe Ideas
46
47 >roller skating, biking, and exploring
alleys with a “very active bunch” of
cousins. At the beach, she discovered a
“Each character, each person inspires voracious, self-forgetting appetite for life
me and gives me something that someone that still energizes her work and travel.
else doesn’t have.”
“My mother, she used to cry out to us
and beg us to come out and have a bite,
you know, because we wouldn’t come
out of the water,” Flavia says, grinning
at the memory. “And big waves
wouldn’t scare us either. We were always
there. Sometimes the lifeguard had to
bring us back.”
In July 1974, Flavia’s parents and two
brothers piled into a light blue Mazda
station wagon for a 24-day drive from
Beirut to Athens and back. It was a
more innocent time then, as the world
opened up; only months later, it would
close in with the advent of the Lebanese
Civil War.
Forest fires, flood, and a panic in Greece
triggered by the Turkish invasion of
Cyprus couldn’t dim the children’s
wonder at encountering the wider
world and its treasures – antique
frescoes, icons, and old, old stone.
Indeed, Flavia says, the invasion
couldn’t even stop the car from slipping
back into Turkey, just before the border
closed, and heading home.
When Flavia finished high school, her
father handed down his car and advised
her to train as an interior designer, a
career that would pay her bills and help
her keep one foot in the art world.
Steady freelance work drafting interior
perspectives for interior architects,
1> Fruit of the womb, 2007
© Flavia Codsi
along with other small projects, enabled
her to make a living drawing after she
finished a three-year training program.
“When you go back to your painting,
you feel like you’re painting better than
before, because you are exposed to art
all the time,” she says.
The old car had nearly as much
influence on Flavia’s artistic life as the
design degree. It often required the care
of experts, and that meant a lot of time
drinking coffee with mechanics, gazing
into the bowels of blackened ateliers
that, to Flavia, resembled installations.
With watercolors, she began painting
the workshops, industrial facades, and
the worn-out shells of buildings
devastated by war.
A longing to participate in Lebanon’s
artistic community inspired her to
submit her first life-size oil portraits to
Sursock’s Salon. She had settled on this
new concept while strolling through
London art galleries during a month-
long visit.
“I saw huge paintings with portraits of
contemporary people, very modern,
from everyday life, and it really inspired
me,” she says. “That’s when I decided:
I’m going to paint people, I’m going to
paint them big size, and to be able to do
that, it’s better to change to oil.”
Flavia learned by phone that she’d won
a special prize for her first such work –
a diptych of two people in boxes, herself
and her youngest brother, Fabio. The
flash of cameras at the prize ceremony
cut through her surprise – “Oof, is it
that great?” she recalls asking herself –>
 2> Against the wind, 2003
© Flavia Codsi
2
3> Rituel, 1997 © Flavia Codsi

4> Insomnia, 2003 © Flavia Codsi

3 4
 1> Don't let the cuckoos nest, 2009
© Flavia Codsi

2> Fructivores, 2007

© Flavia Codsi
1 2

Ripe Ideas
48
49 first layer of the subject, refining her
color scheme. Then, she returns to the
background before completing her
subject.

The correct choice of background color

is essential, Flavia says, to the mood,
look, and central idea of each piece. She
often works at night in her small studio,
powerful artificial lights making up for
the sun’s absence, detailed photographs
standing in for professional models.

Imagination has its place in realism,

Flavia says, but for her it is subordinate
to the pull of everyday life. Sometimes
an idea sends her in search of the right
person to embody it; other times, she
builds a painting around a visually
striking individual, perhaps a friend or
acquaintance, who might also happen to
be a familiar figure from Lebanon’s art
scene, or someone she sees on the street.

“Each character I choose inspires me

“When you go back to your painting,
you feel like you’re painting better than
before, because you are exposed to art
all the time.”
>but even the winning streak that
unfolded over the next two years
couldn’t deliver a financial windfall.
Only after she married in 2000 and her
husband took a full-time job did she
feel comfortable devoting more time to
fully exploring the style that emerged in
her early large-scale works.
Process keeps Flavia on course: she
normally lays out her vision in pencil
on canvas, then she moves on to the
first layer of the background, and
finishes this phase of the work with the
and gives me something that someone
else doesn’t have,” Flavia says. First
impressions are telling, but it is the
stubborn refusal of one notion to fade
that ultimately sets it apart from
another, its ripening that commands
Flavia to pick up a pencil and begin
something new.
Over the decades of an innately artistic
life, her interests have shifted from
nature to building façades to her
relations with people and a recent series
of fruit still lifes. Flavia seems to be
turning inward, but a closer look at her
work – at the painted woman yet to
show her face – reminds the viewer that
it’s never that simple. ■
3> The cherry on the cake, 2007 © Flavia Codsi