Under The Bombs (cert TBC)
(SOUS LES BOMBES)
A film by PHILIPPE ARACTINGI
WINNER Premio EIUC Human Rights Film Award & ARCA Cinemagiovani Award
(ARCA Prize for Youths) - Venice Film Festival 2007
WINNER Gold Muhr Award - Dubai International Film Festival 2007
Starring
Nada Abou Farhat, Georges Khabbaz & Rawya El Chab
France, Lebanon, UK, Belgium / 2007 / 98 Mins / In Arabic with English Subtitles / Colour / 1.85
UK RELEASE DATE: 21 MARCH 2008 TBC
Opening at selected West End Venues
and selected cinemas nationwide
An Artificial Eye Release
Images are available on image.net
For further information please contact: press@artificial-eye.com
Artificial Eye Film Company, 20 - 22 Stukeley Street London WC2B 5LR
The 2006 war in Lebanon comes to the cinema. UNDER THE BOMBS, which won the Premio EIUC Human Rights Film Award and ARCA Cinemagiovani Award at the 64th Venice Film Festival, is not only a film on the war but also a film inside the war. Shot during the Israeli bombing of the south of the country, the film by Philippe Aractingi is a documentary, a love story, a work of civil commitment and is the first testimony of the latest Lebanese conflict to be taken to the big screen. The film is almost an experiment; it was started without producers, without a script, only with some scenes shot in the summer of 2006, and has become a documentary of 90 minutes where fiction melds with reality.
Zeina is a Lebanese woman in the middle of a divorce. In order to spare her son, Karim, she sends him to stay with her sister in a little village in the South of Lebanon. One week later, the war breaks out in Lebanon. Terribly worried, she goes to Lebanon to find them, but only one taxi-driver, Toni, agrees to drive her to the South. Zeina and Toni are far from sharing the same political views - he is Christian and she is a Shiite,
but they drive south together, into a landscape devastated by bombs. When they finally reach the house of Zeina’s sister, they realize they are too late: it has been hit, and only a pile of rubble remains. Zeina’s sister is dead. Ali, a kid from the village, comes forward to tell them that her son Karim is safe but has left the village. So begins Zeina and Tony’s search for her son with devastating results….
"In the beginning we shot only material on the war, then we found producers and then we wrote a script with the actors working together with ordinary people whom they met on the streets while we were filming
"The entire work on the film, from the search for producers to post production, lasted only one year…I was so angry about the umpteenth conflict which brought destruction and death to my country that I shot the entire material from an instinct which was pushing me to say something in a hurry.
"I wanted to make a film about the war and the only way for me to do that was to use reality "
• Philippe Aractingi.
Of Franco-Lebanese origin, Philippe Aractingi was born in 1964 in Beirut where he grew up. He has made more than 40 films, around the world, ranging from reports and documentaries to more personal films. Self taught and a humanist, Philippe Aractingi spent 12 years in France before returning to his native Lebanon to make BOSTA, the country’s first post war musical. BOSTA, a huge success in Lebanon and all over the Arab world, has been released in over twenty countries. It was selected to represent Lebanon at the 2006 Oscars Academy Award. In July 2006, as war once again ravaged his country, Philippe Aractingi reacted, in the heat of the moment, by shooting his second feature film: UNDER THE BOMBS.
