Al houroub al saghira
Lebanon,
1983, 108 min
Shown in 1983
CREDITS
- dir
-
Maroun Baghdadi
- prod
-
Maroun Baghdadi
- scr
-
Maroun Baghdadi
- cam
-
Ed Lachman
- editor
-
Joelle van Effentere
- cast
-
Soraya Khoury, Nabil Ismail, Roger Hawa
In his first feature, Little Wars, Maroun Bagdadi, a 32-year-old Lebanese Christian consciously transcends the categories and clichés of “left” and “right,” Moslem and Christian. He recounts a story and evokes a milieu illustrating the tragic course of the fratricide in Beirut, as well as the means by which people survive on a daily basis. A thriller and a love story, Little Wars stars Soraya Khoury as a woman who is unable to leave Beirut or to accept what the director calls “this trash heap of the Middle East today.” Her movements in Beirut intersect with those of two compulsive characters, a daredevil news photographer and part-time drug dealer named Nabil and Talil Bey, heir to one of Lebanon’s great feudal clans, a Beirut playboy until his father’s kidnapping forces him to conform to his blood-inherited responsibilities. For showing great sympathy for the plight of the Moslem peasantry of South Lebanon in his documentary Story of a Village, as well as for the incongruity of his residence in the Islamic sector of Beirut, Bagdadi is considered in some quarters as a traitor to his Christian clan. As an erudite, educated Christian intellectual, he is a mistrusted “outsider” among Moslems and Palestinians.
—Tom Luddy
FACTOID #25
The San Francisco International showed Lina Wertm’ller’s first film, The Lizards, in 1963. A favorite of Bay Area audiences, her features All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi had their U.S. premieres at the SFIFF in 1972 and 1974.
