Simon El Habre (Lebanon)

updated: September 25, 2007

A chance decision to attend a panel on Middle Eastern cinema at the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2006 had unexpected results for Lebanese filmmaker Simon El Habre and his first feature-length film, the documentary The One-Man Village, which was pitched to potential partners at the Open Doors forum in Locarno.

A graduate of the film school in Beirut and FEMIS in Paris where he specialised in film editing, Simon first attended the Talent Campus in Berlin in 2005. "I submitted a one-minute sample of a short film - Chambre 220 - I had done when I was in Paris", he recalls. "That was the year that editing was the focus, so it really made sense for me to be there. It was one of the first times that I had gone to a film festival and met people from the business. I realised that in future if I go somewhere, I have to go with a project otherwise this is not efficient.

Chance meeting

He returned to the Campus a year later with the script of the documentary The One-Man Village at a very early stage of development. "By coincidence, I attended a conference about filmmaking in the Middle East and Irit [Neidhardt of Mec Film] was one of the panellists," Simon continues. "We got in contact and talked about this project, she liked it very much and decided to come onboard. Since then, we have been working now for a year and a half on the development and I think that this was the main thing that was beneficial for me from the Talent Campus. Irit was very devoted to the project and helped me a lot to see things I was maybe not aware of - or they were in my subconscious - and to put them more to the fore."

Irit Neidhardt adds: "After the workshop as usual at festivals, lots of people come up to you with tons of material, but Simon was the only who didn't give me anything; he just asked me when he could call me. This was it, that was the only way I could remember him."

She explains that it is a recent development for Mec Film to become involved in co-producing. The company is five years old and started out as a local distribution company for German theatrical releases and very soon added the function of an international sales agency. "It was also organic that co-producing also came in because we have good working relations with some of the directors who sent me scripts," Irit explains.

A personal story

Simon's project is a personal story focussing on his uncle Semaan El Habre who is now the only person living in the family village Ain El Halazoun in the mountains above Beirut. After being besieged by Christian and Druze militias during the 1975-1990 civil war, the village - like many others - became a ghost town as the inhabitants all moved away and the buildings were destroyed or fell into disrepair.

According to Simon, The One-Man Village, whose development he has financed out of his own pocket and with support from the local filmmakers' cooperative Beirut DC (www.beirutdc.org), "reflects on the nature of collective and individual memory" and is "a story of healing and true reconciliation in a country in which the inhabitants don't seem to have learned anything from their past, at a time when the country is vulnerable to a new civil war."

At the pitching session in Locarno, Simon and his producer Jad Abi Khalil at Beirut DC "showed some test footage of eight days shooting to see how the rhythm of the production is. It was also a test for me and the crew to meet with my uncle and to see what kind of relationship there will be, and a way of motivating the crew as well. Having this test led us to increase the number of shooting days from 10 to 40 so that we will be shooting in each season of the year."

Before this documentary Simon has been working as an editor and teaching editing in Beirut since graduation from FEMIS in 2000. He has also worked on video clips and commercials and recently on TV reportages and documentaries as well as short films and features.

Best of both worlds

Having studied in Lebanon and France has given him the best of both worlds. "The thing in Beirut is that there is no specialisation, so everyone graduates as a director," he says. "During my learning process I was taken by the editing phase of film and wanted to develop this in Lebanon. Then I applied to FEMIS and this opened up a lot of my vision of the filmmaking process and how important the construction of a film is during editing, especially for documentaries. At the same time, FEMIS is rather cosmopolitan because you have several nationalities studying there so I worked on films by Chinese and Portuguese directors. Then they sent us to FOCAL in Laussane to edit the graduation films which encouraged a very varied way of thinking, firstly on a personal level, and secondly seeing things and filmmaking in different ways."

Given that there is no real independent cinema in Lebanon, the Beirut DC cooperative with its 14 members has become a veritable haven for budding young filmmakers there. "It is a cooperative of directors and producers working through the Arab world supporting production, distribution, promotion and festivals," Jad Abi Khalil explains. "The young filmmakers are trying to make something happen in Lebanon but it is a very confused situation. We change positions from director to producer etc. to make films possible. It is different from the European way of thinking, but it works."

Working in a cooperative

"I believe when a director looks for a producer at a very early stage of a project he doesn't need a businessman, but someone who is creative and can help him to develop his ideas and push these ideas to the maximum, to look beyond financial things which can come later," Simon El Habre adds. "It might seem schizophrenic to have a situation with the director becoming a producer to help his friends make their films even though he is still a director. But he will really try to separate these things and not intervene too much."

At the moment, there is no public government funding for cinema in Lebanon. "It is only moral support from the Minister of Culture and it is frustrating that there are only nice words, but no financial support," Jad observes. "Culture takes a back seat with these political conflicts going on."

The opportunities of getting to see films outside of the mainstream are also few and far between given that there are not enough independent cinemas in the country. Beirut DC has tried to do its bit to improve the situation by organising a film festival - Ayam Beirut All Cinema'lya - to enable the local population to see different films and is a partner of the Metropolis cinema in the capital "to show independent cinema and also documentaries because they never get to be seen on the big screen in Lebanon."