Lebanese Director Karim Kassem Had Two Weeks to Improvise a New Film on the Fly

variety.com:

Ben Croll Two weeks before the cameras were set to roll, everything fell apart. At that point, “Moondove” director Karim Kassem had spent two years developing his fourth feature and then painstakingly getting the project off the ground.

The nonfiction film was supposed to follow a young woman who returns to a small village in Mount Lebanon after years of living abroad, with the central lead helping to connect the various eclectic townsfolk she would encounter.

The story was locked, sequences were storyboarded and the locals were ready to shoot – and then, 14 days before the big day, both the lead and the cinematographer pulled out. “I had to burn the script,” says Kassem at the Cairo Film Festival, where “Moondove” is playing in competition. “And then I had two choices: Whether to cry all of August or to improvise a different film.” Kassem opted for the latter, feverishly writing a brand new script in the two-week window before production, also improvising a new shot-list as he assumed DP duties as well. “I had all the fundamental themes,” he says. “I had all the elements and characters already in place; now they came to the forefront.

They took the stage, I guess, [but] they already felt like family because we had spent those two years getting to know then.” This 2.0 version would embrace that stage aspect, using town-wide rehearsals for an unseen play as a narrative device to connect the various strands. “I would walk around during pre-production and see the flyers for the actual play that was unfolding, that [one of the film’s subjects] was actually in.