Lebanon’s Crisis Weary Filmmakers Talk Impact Of Escalating Israel-Hezbollah Conflict
deadline.comLebanese producer Christelle Younes was set to attend Italy’s MIA Market this week to pitch feature film project So The Lovers Could Come Out Again in the Rome event’s Co-Pro Market but has cancelled the trip.
She also abandoned a trip to Jordan last week for the Royal Film Commission’s inaugural Arab Producers Lab (APL), a joint initiative with European producers’ org EAVE on which she had been selected as one of the first six participants.
Instead, she is hunkering down in northern Lebanon, monitoring the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed, armed group Hezbollah, having left her home in the Achrafieh area of East Beirut.
The upscale district has been spared the relentless Israeli bombardments that have pounded Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon and Beirut since late September, but an airstrike in the neighboring area of Basta last Thursday killed at least 22 people and wounded 117 others. “We’ve come North because there is no conflict, no airstrikes,” Younes told Deadline, but speaking ahead of an Israeli airstrike on a predominantly Christian village in Northern Lebanon on Monday, which killed 20 people.
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