27 August 2008

BEIRUT: Tripoli-born filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabag died in Paris on Monday after a years-long struggle with breast cancer. At a mere 55 years of age, Sabag's passing is nothing if not premature.

Like many filmmakers from Lebanon and the wider Middle East, where the film industry is either non-existent or financially proscribed, Sabag's is a small oeuvre. With a half-dozen international film festival prizes under her belt, it is also a critically significant one.

Sabag began her career with documentary film but she'd started to turn her attention to feature films by the 1990s, though she retained a documentary-maker's nose for contentious subject matter.

Her 1997 drama "Les Infid?les" is a case in point. It tells a story of the relationship between a French diplomat and a former Islamist who agrees to turn over the names of his erstwhile colleagues if the French government will release an imprisoned friend. Made for French television, the movie dwells on the passionate attraction between the former militant and the (married) diplomat, and the ensuing seduction of one by the other.

Sabag's next feature, 1999's "Civilis?es," takes up her country's 1975-1990 civil war as seen from the perspective of those marginal persons who remained in Beirut in the dark years of the mid-1980s. She deployed a vaudevillian cast - foreign servants and philanthropists, visiting expats, militiamen and criminals - in a profane and dislocated story mingling elements of Brecht and Beckett.

"Civilis?es" was not well-received by the managers of late reconstruction-era Beirut, screening just once at the Beirut International Film Festival. Following this, the country's censor flensed some 40 minutes from its running time, citing bad language (evidently out of character, despite the fact that most of it was uttered by snipers, militiamen and the like) and its uncomplimentary representation of Lebanon during this particularly unsavory spell of its history.

Her greatest commercial and critical success came in 2003 and the release of "The Kite," which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival and won three other prizes - the Grand Special Jury Prize, the Cinema for Peace Award and the Laterna Magica Prize.

Set in a putatively anonymous Qunaytra-like South Lebanese village, the film recounts the story of an arranged marriage between Lamia, a 15-year-old Lebanese Druze girl, and her Israeli Druze cousin. The drama unfolds under the watchful eyes of a pair of Israeli Arab border guards, one of whom is played by Lebanese composer-actor-playwright Ziad Rahbani.

In 2005, Sabag decided she was ready to move to the next level. During a press tour in August of that year, she her next project would be a Hollywood film with Lebanese-American producer Elie Samaha - who at that point had such distinguished films to his credit as Sean Penn's 2001 "The Pledge," David Mamet's 2001 "Heist," Roger Christian's 2000 "Battlefield Earth."

With the working title "Too Bad for Them," the film, Sabag explained during an interview at that time, would combine comedy, music and dancing as well as politics, particularly that of north-south economic disparities. Its story focussed on two football clubs - one at home, the other visiting from abroad, one is from the global south, the other from the north.

Both Sabag and Samaha expressed great optimism about the project, which was to be in English with some Arabic dialogue and would likely star Lebanese pop diva Haifa Wehbe. The writer-director said she hoped the film would be released as early as October 2006. A great deal has happened in the interim and the project never saw the light of day.