August 22, 2012
by Jim Quilty
BEIRUT: About a year ago,
Pierre Sarraf and his colleagues at Né a Beyrouth decided it was time to put
down the Lebanese Film Festival. Everyone has the privilege to change their
minds.
The production company had
good reasons to discontinue the festival, then on the brink of its tenth
edition. In 2011, Sarraf told this journalist, the shape of the film festival
landscape in Lebanon and the Middle East had changed a great deal since LFF was
launched in 2001 (under the name “Né a Beyrouth”). With the number of festivals
competing for Lebanese film premieres swelling, it was becoming ever harder to
find new films for LFF.
Sarraf envisioned a new
formula. Rather than devoting so much energy to a once-a-year festival, he and
his colleagues imagined smaller events tailored to individual films.
Then this spring Metropolis,
Beirut’s independent art house cinema, launched “Scrapbook,” a program that
gave a bundle of recent critically acclaimed feature-length films Beirut
premieres followed by theatrical release.
“When I saw that Metropolis
had started” Scrapbook, Sarraf recalls. “I said, fine, let’s keep the festival
and try to coordinate [with the cinema in] releasing films in this way.”
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