Producing an independent film is a challenge at the best of times: Beirut-based producer Georges Schoucair has shot two tightly financed indie features and helped launch a new arthouse cinema this year against the backdrop of war.
The veteran Lebanese producer, whose credits include Memory Box and Costa Brava, Lebanon, has been at the Red Sea Film Festival this past week as a member of the in-development jury for its Red Sea Souk project market.
He arrived from Morocco’s Marrakech Film Festival, where he had been participating in its Atlas Workshops project market with Cyril Aris’ It’s A Sad And Beautiful World, where it won a €10,000 post-production prize.
Mixing social drama, the romantic comedy follows an unlikely couple over three decades as they fall in love against the odds and then confront the challenges of parenthood against the backdrop of conflict and crisis-ridden Beirut, amid disputes over whether they should stay or leave the country.
Director and actor Mounia Akl – who directed Costa Brava, Lebanon and has since worked on Boiling Point and The Responder in the UK – co-stars opposite Hassan Akil.
It is one of two films Schoucair got into production this year, alongside Nadim Tabet’s In This Darkness I See You, a ghost story about a young Syrian deserter, who finds work on a construction site near a Lebanese village where he is confronted with hostility from the locals.
Both films are now in post-production, having shot against the escalating conflict between Israel and militia group Hezbollah, which started bubbling in Southern Israel in late 2023, when the Iran-backed militia group started bombing northern Israel the day after the Hamas October 7 attacks.
The conflict arrived in Beirut this September, after Israel launched a major ground and air offensive, kicking off with an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed and maimed when their pagers and walkie talkies exploded.
“We knew the war would eventually arrive in Beirut, it was just a matter of when,” says Schoucair. “The question for us was do we shoot these two movies or not?”
The producer first announced Tabet’s In This Darkness I See You at the Fantasia Film Festival in Canada in August, 2018, where the project, then titled Under Construction, was presented in the project market.
He cites a list of local and world events that have taken place since, kicking off with Lebanon’s financial meltdown in 2019, which provoked street protests against political corruption and mismanagement of the economy; followed by the Covid-19 pandemic and then the Beirut explosion on August 20, 2020.
The blast, which caused at least 218 deaths and injured another 7,000 people, blew out the offices of Schoucair’s Abbout Productions, injuring director Akl and producer Myriam Sassine, who were working there on pre-production for Costa Brava, Lebanon. Schoucair, who had returned to his nearby home, was also injured while his house was badly damaged.
“Then there was start of the Ukraine War in 2022, the Hamas attacks, and then the war in Lebanon,” he continues.
Schoucair and Sassine got the shoot of Costa Brava, Lebanon over the line in the hills above Beirut in the fall of 2020, even though much of the crew and cast were in a shell-shocked state. It world premiered at Venice in 2021.
At the same time as developing his fiction feature It’s A Sad And Beautiful World, Aris captured the story of the making of Costa Brava, Lebanon for the documentary Dancing On The Edge Of A Volcano.
“I can’t watch it. I watched it once in the edit stage to give my advice, but it was terrible to see my office, Miriam, Mounia… We had Mounia’s blood on the walls. The decision was whether to do Costa Brava, Lebanon or not… and in the end, we did wounded, tired and depressed, just to be able to do something.”
Schoucair also continued to work on the development and financing of It’s A Sad And Beautiful World and In This Darkness I See You.
As 2023 became 2024, and with war rumbling on in the backdrop in southern Lebanon, Schoucair decided to bite the bullet and get the shoots for It’s A Sad And Beautiful World and In This Darkness I See You underway.
“It was risky, because if you spend $120,000 to do a movie and you stop in the middle, you can’t do it again, but we were like let’s do it… we couldn’t sit there doing nothing forever,” he recounts, saying he tapped into the same spirit that Costa Brava, Lebanon over the line.
Filming on In This Darkness I See You began in the mountains south of Beirut in the spring 2024, but mid-way through the shoot, an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in neighboring Syria, killed several military officials, including top Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammed Reza Zahedi.
In retaliation, Iran launched an attack on April 1 involving more than 300 missiles, drones and UAVs, some of which were fired by Hezbollah from positions in Lebanon.
“Over eight hours there were 300 missiles. We were shooting in the mountains with 63 people including Syrian actors, with these missiles,” recounts Schoucair. “It was a nightmare.”
A week later, Pascal Sleiman, a prominent figure in the Christian Lebanese Forces party, was abducted in the Byblos area of Lebanon. After his body was found near Syrian city of Homs, there was a backlash against Syrian refugees.
“We had nine Syrian actors in the film who were playing the Syrian workers, who demanded to go back home,” says Schoucair. “So that was the mood of the shoot: the war, the missiles and the Syrians leaving.”
In This Darkness I See You wrapped in the early summer, against the odds, and Schoucair immediately moved onto the shoot for It’s A Sad And Beautiful World, which wrapped on June 6.
“We shot them back-to-back. The first day of Cyril’s film, was the last day of the other one. It’s a romantic comedy, following a couple across 30 years. The first part is in war, the second is the golden age, and the third is the bankruptcy, we missed a fourth, which would have been war again,” he says.
The shoot had originally been scheduled for October, 2024, because Aris’ wife was due to give birth over the summer.
“The last shot of the last day, his phone went. On the monitor, you have Mounia playing the role. On the phone, you have her [his wife] giving birth. It was the last shot of the last day, I swear. He was shooting and crying, and we heard the kid. He said “Cut, cheers” and immediately took the plane.”
Aris is now in L.A. working with Moonlight editor Nat Sanders, through the film’s U.S. producer Jennifer Goyne Blake.
In This Darkness I See You is also at the edit stage, with Tabet working with French editor Loïc Lallemand (Divines, Waiting for Bojangles) in Paris, while Schoucair continues to piece together the financing for post-production.
“Because I wanted to get it shot, whatever happened, I greenlighted the movie without the money for post-production. It’s the first time I’ve done this for years. I paid the editor out of the company,” says Schoucair, who is seeking a combination of soft money and equity to close the gap.
Schoucair, has spent most of the fall in Paris after getting stuck in Europe, with the escalation of the Hezbollah-Israel conflict, but hopes to return to Beirut soon if the fragile ceasefire holds.
He had been attending Final Cut in Venice with In The Darkness I See You, where it won two post-production prizes, and in the U.S. prior to the ratcheting up of the conflict.
Alongside producing, Schoucair is also part of a group led by Hania Mroueh, relaunching Beirut’s Metropolis arthouse cinema on a piece of temporarily donated land in the Mar Mikhael area of the city.
The two-theatre venue, which has been designed by architect Sophie Khayat in such a way that it can be dismantled and moved to another site, was due to open in September with the presence of an A-list star, but the launch was cancelled.
A smaller symbolic event was held in the venue in October and the founders are now gearing up for a bigger official opener on December 21, ceasefire permitting.
“In the end, we shot the two movies and the cinema is open, so voila, this is my year,” he says. “I was lucky. My last movie was Costa Brava, Lebanon and we shot in 2020. 2021 was the editing and Venice launch, then 2022 and 2023, I was sitting, waiting, I had to do something.”
Schoucair, who plans to return to Lebanon in the wake of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, is now gearing up for the shoot of Danielle Arbid’s Beirut-set production Love Conquers All, starring Hiam Abbass, as a 65-year-old widow, who falls in love with a young Sudanese man.
“We’ll shoot in the studios in Paris. Everything vertical on the floor will be in Paris, everything you see on the walls will be shot in Beirut. We have a second unit in Beirut, shooting the apartment, the kitchen,” he says.
“For Danielle, it’s a political statement to say, we’re making a film set in Beirut, we can’t shoot in Beirut, but we are going to show Beirut.”