ANXIOUS IN BEIRUT
Zakaria Jaber | Lebanon 2023 | 93 min. | Arabic with English subtitles
WEDNESDAY, 22.05. | 7 pm
Kino De France, Saal 1 | TICKETS
Austrian premiere
Burning barricades in Beirut: young people feel abandoned by society and the government. With no prospects and disgruntled, they nevertheless fight relentlessly for a better future. For years, Lebanon has been plagued by economic crises and corruption, and the pandemic and the explosion in Beirut’s port in 2020 have further shaken the city and the country. Young people say there are only two ways to escape from Lebanon: on a plane or in a coffin.
Zakaria Jaber and his friends find themselves right in the middle of this seemingly hopeless downward spiral. In his diary, Zakaria documents several years of the youth’s rebellion against decay – intersecting stories that unfold between philosophical conversations at the kitchen table and nightly street battles with the police
Director: Zakaria Jaber
Cinematography: Zakaria Jaber, Ahmad Al Trabolsi, Tareq Keblaoui
Editing: Zakaria Jaber
Sound: Ralph Atallah
Production: Jumana Saadeh
SCREENINGS & AWARDS
National premiere – Ecrans du Reel Beirut Lebanon
International Premiere – Shanghai Film Festival Documentary Competition
North American premiere – Maine IFF
Amman IFF
Golden Goblet prize in the documentary competition of Shanghai Film Festival
Special Mention for First-time Editor in the Arab Feature-Length Documentary Competition at Amman IFF
Per So Perugia – Audience Award
Lugano HRFF – Amnesty International Award
Jury Prize – Mostra de Cinema Arab de Catalunia
BIOGRAPHY
Zakaria Jaber (1994) is a film director, editor and writer. He is self-taught with multiple layers of experiences in the fields of journalism, filmmaking and video editing. In 2018 he managed to produce and direct his first short film independently after years of work in TV production and reporting with various prestigious news outlets in the middle east. In 2019, he took a step forward in “Anxious in Beirut” his first feature documentary and spent three years documenting the lives of his friends, family and the events that happened between the revolution in 2019 reaching the total economic and social collapse in 2022. In 2022 he founded his writing company “Outcast Stories”.
