{"id":33354,"date":"2024-06-07T09:43:28","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T07:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=33354"},"modified":"2024-06-11T12:30:58","modified_gmt":"2024-06-11T10:30:58","slug":"beirut-in-two-stages-a-theatre-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/beirut-in-two-stages-a-theatre-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Omar Naim Exclusive: Two Films on Beirut & Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"
Omar Naim is a writer and director from Lebanon. He has made three feature fiction films and two documentaries, both about the theatre and the city of Beirut, shot nearly twenty years apart. They are being shown here together for the first time. <\/span>Grand Theatre: A Tale of Beirut<\/em> was his thesis film, shot in the summer of 1998, less than a decade after the end of the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War. It was a student Academy Award finalist. In 2016, two years into a presidential crisis in Lebanon, he shot<\/span> Madinatan (<\/span>Two Cities)<\/em>, a documentation of the 20<\/span>th<\/span> anniversary celebrations of the Al-Madina Theatre in Beirut. <\/span>Madinatan<\/em> was acquired by BBC Arabic and screened on TV both there and on LBC. These are his reflections on the making of these two films.<\/span><\/h5>\n

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Omar Naim<\/h4>\n

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When I was a boy, theatre was like God: I had absolute faith in it, despite never seeing any evidence that it existed. I was raised in Jordan, Cyprus and Beirut in the \u201880s and early \u201890s. Except for school plays, there just wasn\u2019t much theatre around to be seen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then again, my mother is Nidal Ashkar, Lebanese actress and director, star of Arab stage and screen, and later the founder of the Al Madina Theatre on Hamra street. At home, the power of theatre was never in doubt. My mother sacrificed for it, fought for it, shaped her life around this art form. It was akin to being raised by the clergy of a dead religion. She did put on two amazing productions during this period, <\/span>1001 Tales from Souk Oukaz<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Al Halaba<\/span><\/i>, which left a deep impression on me, but an impression in the shape of my mother, not necessarily theatre. Those works seemed more like an extension of her personality and less like examples of a medium.<\/span><\/p>\n

At 13, I was struck down with a mad love for the movies. Unlike theatre, film was everywhere. VHS was the great equalizer. From our Lebanese village home, I could steep myself in film as deeply as a young film lover might do in Los Angeles or Paris or New York. When I arrived at film school in Boston, I was as fluent in film as any of my peers. I wanted to learn and to succeed, but I also wanted to do some good: being an Arab watching Arabs and other Middle Easterners on film was often painful. I don\u2019t need to explain that to you: we were bad guys, oafs, extremists, people who kidnapped Sally Field\u2019s daughter.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1998 I had to choose a subject for my BFA thesis film. I wanted to write a musical <\/span>grand guignol <\/span><\/i>of <\/span>Hansel & Gretel<\/span><\/i>. My advisors wisely suggested that perhaps, instead of adapting a Germanic fairy tale, something anyone could do, what if instead I made a documentary about my home country? This was good advice that I resisted with all my will. I was slightly offended \u2014 why couldn\u2019t I make a fanciful, stylized art object? Why was it <\/span>fait accompli<\/span><\/i> that since I was from a \u201ctroubled\u201d country I had to make a documentary? I told them, \u201cWhat a great idea,\u201d all the while thinking, \u201cFuck you, I\u2019ll show you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My plan was to <\/span>pretend<\/span><\/i> to be making a documentary, and then, when I arrived in Lebanon with the school\u2019s crew and equipment, I\u2019d make whatever the hell I wanted. I vaguely remembered the Grand Theatre, an old abandoned stage, from a school trip and my mother\u2019s attempts to refurbish it in the early nineties. I told them the idea for the documentary was Theatre of War. Yes, lame, I know. I thought that was the sort of thing they\u2019d green light, and I was right.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then something unexpected happened \u2014 I fell in love with documentaries and with my Trojan horse subject itself. The story of the Grand Theatre actually had rich metaphorical power; it was very visual and beautiful; and most importantly for a documentary, I had access. Through the theatre world that my family was deeply connected to, I could get interviews and archival footage that others would be denied. The more I researched, the more a simple but powerful equation solidified in my mind: the story of the Grand Theatre was the story of Beirut. It was a perfect microcosm, a way to explore my feelings about my home in an indirect way, a hopefully artful way \u2014 a fact-based film as far away from journalism as you can get.<\/span><\/p>\n

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