“The Sea Before You” .. A Lebanese Narrative Film at the Cannes Film Festival

Beirut – “Al Quds Al Arabi”: After receiving the Golden Palm six years ago for the best short film from the Cannes Film Festival, as he became the first Arab director to receive that award, director Elie Dagher will hold four screenings for his first feature film entitled “The Sea Before You.” At the Cannes Film Festival, the film is competing for the Golden Camera award.

The film “The Sea Before You”, which is written and directed by Elie Dagher, tells in his first long fictional experience, the story of Jana, a young girl living in France, who decided to return suddenly to Beirut and finds herself reviving the familiar ties of her life that became strange after her absence, and the film deals with the events that she witnesses Lebanon for a long time and the consequent loss of vision, as it highlights some aspects that prompted the Lebanese to emigrate outside their country to escape the painful reality that made some of the Lebanese who remained in their homeland feel alienated from it, but these conditions and events formed a fertile environment for Lebanese creativity. In many artistic and cultural fields.

Dagher explained that the issue of alienation that he deals with in this film, starring Manal Issa, Yara Abu Haidar, Rabie El-Zahr and Roger Azar, is not intended to emigrate because more than 70 percent of the Lebanese are abroad, but rather chose the subject of social alienation that makes residents feel separated from Values, standards, practices and social relations in Lebanese society.