The Great Family
Fall Grant 2015 - Development Stage
Eliane Raheb / Feature Documentary / Lebanon, France, Qatar / 80 min / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: Creative Documentary
Synopsis
‘The Great Family’ follows the story of Marlene, a 43-year-old woman who was adopted from Lebanon by a French family in 1976 when she was four years old. As she investigates the traces of her identity, she discovers she is from the Tal Al Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp, which fell during the Lebanese Civil War. The camp is only kept alive through the testimonies of its survivors, who are scattered in Lebanon, Jordan, Germany, Norway and Sweden, and, even 40 years later, are unable to ingest the ugliness of what they lived on 12 August, 1976. As the film progresses, solid ties are built among Marlene and the survivors of Tal Al Zaatar, and they all become one great family.
Credits
- Director
- Eliane Raheb
- Screenwriter
- Eliane Raheb
- Producer
- Lara Abou Saifan , Nathalie Combe
- Production Company
- Beirut DC, Itar Productions, Cosmpgraphe Productions
About the Director
Lebanese director Eliane Raheb has directed several short and medium-length films, which have won awards at various festivals and have been broadcast on ARTE/ZDF, Al Jazeera and NHK. ‘Sleepless Nights’ (2012), her first feature-length documentary, screened in more than 40 film festivals and was ranked fifth in ‘Sight and Sound’ magazine’s listing of the best documentaries of 2013. Raheb is a founding member of Beirut DC, where she established the Beirut Cinema Days film festival. She has taught documentary filmmaking at the Université Saint-Joseph since 2003 and is currently a guest of the prestigious DAAD arts academy of Berlin.
Contacts
-
Main Contact
Eliane Raheb
- Company:
- Beirut DC/ Itar Productions/ Cosmographe Productions
- Phone:
- +961 129 3212/ +961 335 5822
- Email:
- eliane.raheb@beirutdc.org