LEBANON: Nadine Labaki's film "Caramel" shuns war stories to explore love and sex themes inspired by real Lebanese women's lives

In a cinema industry traditionally dominated by the theme of war, "Caramel", a film by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, shies away from conflict and instead brings to light social dilemmas faced by Lebanese women. "Caramel", or "Sukkar Banat" as the movie is titled in Arabic, revolves around the lives of five Lebanese women, each burdened with their own social and moral problems. This is Labaki's first feature-length movie and was shown during the Cannes Film Festival in May. Most Lebanese films have tended to tackle themes revolving around the 1975-1990 civil war that destroyed much of the country's social fabric -- its social repercussions, sectarianism and post-war malaise. Labaki has chosen to deviate from this trend. "It's only natural that I don't speak about war in the film. I am someone who wants to forget about war. I want to show a new image of Lebanon. Lebanon is not just burning buildings and people crying on the side of the road. This is the first thing anyone, especially a foreigner, thinks about when you mention Lebanon or Beirut. But for me, Lebanon is also about other things. We are ordinary people, we live experiences that have nothing to do with the war, we live love stories and other things which have nothing to do with war," Labaki told Reuters television in Beirut. The women face social issues that are quintessential in today's Lebanon, but which society marks as taboo, such as sex before marriage, lesbianism and drugs. The main setting is a beauty salon in Beirut, where women talk frankly about men, sex, marriage and happiness. One character, Nisrine, is a Muslim woman about to get married, but her husband-to-be is unaware that she is not a virgin. Rima's character is a tomboy who struggles with her feelings for an attractive female client, while Jamale goes out of her way to prove she is still young. Rose, a 65-year-old seamstress, sacrifices love to care for her elderly sister. "We are not talking about stories that don't exist. We are not making things up. These are stories we heard and are based on people we know. They could be from my neighbor or one of my relatives, or they could be one of my grandmother's stories," said Labaki. The movie's title is inspired by the mixture of sugar, water and lemon used by Arab women as a traditional depilation method, and also stars Labaki as Layale, a 30-year-old single Lebanese Christian who owns the salon and is involved with a married man. Though the film is not intentionally political, it portrays the women, who are from a mixture of sects and backgrounds, as living in harmony -- a message one might see as trying to address the sensitive issue of sectarianism in Lebanon. Labaki first made her mark in 2000 directing music videos for young Lebanese pop stars. Labaki says making music videos was a step towards embarking on a film career in a country that suffers from a lack of film-making resources. "In Lebanon, as you know, there is no cinema industry. So you cannot graduate and the next day start working on a new film. You have to go into other things first. And also you don't have the necessary experience to make films when you're fresh out of school. You're not mature enough to make a film. So that's why it was good for me to work in music videos. But, of course, cinema was always my dream," said Labaki in an interview. The film has been showing in Lebanon to packed theatres, unusual in a country where audiences tend to prefer Hollywood blockbusters to Arabic films. The film's depiction of reality as it is in many parts of Beirut was part of what attracted many Lebanese movie-goers. "The movie is very good. It really reflects our lives. And it's very, very good," said one young Lebanese woman. An older viewer agreed. "I loved the movie a lot. Because it explains everything and shows our real lives, the way we live them every day."

ITN Source | September 27, 2007

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