Lebanon: Last News

Salman Rushdie hinted in February that he was working on a memoir about the stabbing attack last year that nearly killed him and left him blind in one eye. Now, the Booker Prize winner has announced that book will be called Knife and will be published by Penguin Random House on April 16, 2024.

What the f**k… Former porn star Mia Khalifa i

The Cannes Film Festival has admitted six filmmakers, five women and one man, to its 2024 residency program. 

Stephen Gerard Kelly and Garry Keane’s documentary In The Shadow of Beirut has been submitted as Ireland‘s entry for the 2024 Oscar International Feature Film race.

The San Sebastian Film Festival awarded O Corno (The Rye Horn) with the Golden Shell for Best Film. San Sebastián native Jaione Camborda took the top prize of the night for the feature she directed.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Bosnian director and screenwriter Danis Tanović, whose “No Man’s Land” won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has been selected as the president of the Official Competition Jury at the 45th edition of the Cairo Film Festival. As well as the Oscar, “No Man’s Land” won best screenplay at Cannes in 2001.

Superhero Khalid Raza has changed the lives of more than 24,000 disabled people across the world by gifting them mobility and independence.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Charades has closed multiple deals on “There’s Something in the Barn,” Magnus Martens’s (“Fear the Walking Dead”) comedy horror movie from “Dead Snow” producers at 74 Entertainment and XYZ Films. The English-language movie is headlined by Martin Starr (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Spider Man”), Amrita Acharia (“Game of Thrones”) and Jeppe Beck Laursen (“The Last Kingdom”).

BreAnna Bell Salma Hayek Pinault will be honored with this year’s Giving Tree Award at the 2023 Baby2Baby Gala taking place on November 11 in Los Angeles. The Giving Tree Award is awarded annually to a public figure who has demonstrated exceptional commitment to improving the lives of children in need around the world. Past honorees include Amy Adams, Jessica Alba, Drew Barrymore, Vanessa Bryant, Jennifer Garner, Kate Hudson, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chrissy Teigen, and Kerry Washington.

Fauda, the breakout Israeli thriller drama, is unexpectedly returning for a fifth season, Deadline has confirmed with sources.

Alissa Simon Film Critic As you read this, new titles from filmmakers of Tunisian, Moroccan and Franco-Palestinian-Algerian heritage are making their mark at the Venice Film Festival, while Toronto Film Festival will premiere a trio of first features from Saudi Arabia, along with discoveries from the UAE and Palestine, plus a handful of Arab titles screened at Cannes and Venice. Those in the know say that the annual number of Arab films produced has increased along with the emergence of new filmmakers, and that fall festivals such as El Gouna, Marrakech, Cairo and Red Sea will be chockablock with fresh regional titles.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Elsa Zylberstein, the French César-winning actor and producer whose popular movie “Simone: Woman of the Century” recently opened in the U.S., is preparing a biopic movie of fashion icon Christian Dior. The film is being penned by Julien Teisseire (“The Hookup Plan”) and is being developed by Zylberstein’s banner Sonia Films and Odile McDonald (“Ransom”).

Anghami, the Arab world’s answer to Spotify, is eyeing further expansion following a fresh $5 million investment by SRMG Ventures.

With Tuesday’s grosses, Illumination/Nintendo/Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie has crossed the $100M (13.74B yen) mark in Japan. In doing so, it becomes Universal’s top title ever there. In local currency, Mario overtakes Top Gun: Maverick as the No. 6 Hollywood film of all time in Japan, and is the No. 1 studio picture since the beginning of the pandemic.

Barbie has been banned in multiple countries following its release.Starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the fantasy comedy has become the second highest-grossing film of 2023 worldwide behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie, passing the $1billion mark earlier this month at the box office.The film’s success also crossed another milestone, becoming the highest-grossing live-action movie solely directed by a woman.Ahead of its release in July, Barbie was banned in Vietnam due to a scene featuring a map depicting China’s contested territorial claims in the South China Sea.As reported by Reuters, the scene shows “an offending image” of the “nine-dash line”, which is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over large areas of the South China Sea, which is contested by Vietnam.A number of films have recently been banned in the country for the same reason, including Sony’s Uncharted and Dreamworks’ animated film Abominable.Kuwait subsequently banned Barbie after the film promoted “ideas and beliefs that are alien to the Kuwaiti society and public order”, according to Lafy Al-Subei’e, an under secretary of the Ministry for Press and Publication in the country (via the New York Times).Around the same time (August 9), Lebanon’s culture minister, Mohammad Mortada, made moves to ban Barbie, saying that the film was found to “promote homosexuality and sexual transformation”.

Ellise Shafer “Barbie” has been banned in Algeria in its third week of release, according to Reuters. In a statement to the news site, an unnamed “official source” said that the film “promotes homosexuality and other Western deviances” and “does not comply with Algeria’s religious and cultural beliefs.” The news was first reported by local site 24H Algerie on Monday, which wrote that the North African country’s Ministry of Culture and Arts had asked theaters showing the film to immediately remove it from their schedules.

Algerian authorities have pulled runaway box office hit Barbie from local cinemas over its “damaging morals”.

CMU’s sister media ThreeWeeks is currently covering the Edinburgh Festival, the world’s biggest cultural event, which takes over the Scottish capital for three weeks with a packed programme of comedy, theatre, music, musicals, dance, cabaret, spoken word and a whole lot more.Here in the CMU Daily we’ll pick out some of the highlights of this year’s coverage, including interviews with people who are performing there this year. Today Victor Esses, who is performing a show called ‘The Death & Life Of All Of Us’.“When I was nineteen, I interviewed my great aunt, Marcelle, in Rome, after she lost touch with the family for 30 years”, he explains.

After another weekend at the top of the box office, rumours are emerging that a “Barbie” sequel is in the works.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International The Venice Film Festival is rolling out a juried impact award that will mark the first time a major film festival has awarded a prize focused solely on impact. Impact campaigns are crafted around documentaries and some narrative films that have strong social or political messages that can inspire action among audiences and the industry at large.

Barbie movie has been banned in Kuwait and now faces calls for a ban in Lebanon amid complaints in the Arab nations about the film’s social values.Kuwait’s state news agency said that the nation acted to protect the country’s “public ethics”, while Lebanon’s culture minister accused the film of “promoting homosexuality”.The film is however still being shown in other conservative parts of the region, including Saudi Arabia.Barbie, which is directed by Greta Gerwig and stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, has grossed more than $1bn (£784m) worldwide within weeks of its release.Lafi al-Subaiei, the head of Kuwait’s board of film classification, said that the board usually asks for movie scenes to be cut if they are deemed to flout the country’s culture. But when a film promotes behaviour the state considers unacceptable, it is banned outright.The film “promulgate[s] ideas and beliefs that are alien to Kuwaiti society and public order”, a spokesman for the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information said (via BBC News).On Wednesday, the Lebanese Culture Minister Mohammad Mortada asked the interior ministry to “take all necessary measures to ban” Barbie.He said the film “promotes homosexuality and transsexuality… supports rejecting a father’s guardianship, undermines and ridicules the role of the mother, and questions the necessity of marriage and having a family”.Meanwhile, in the US, comedian and actor Marc Maron recently hit out at the film’s conservative critics, describing them as “insecure babies”.“The fact that certain men took offence to the point where they, you know, tried to build a grift around it in terms of their narrative as right wing [expletive] is so embarrassing for them.