DUBAI: Lebanese director Mounia Akl’s “Costa Brava, Lebanon” is set to make its North American debut in July.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, international film and video distributor Kino Lorber has picked up the North American rights to the dark tale set amid a raging climate crisis in near-future Lebanon.
Akl’s directorial debut premiered in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti Extra sidebar last year and stars Lebanese actress and director Nadine Labaki alongside “The Band’s Visit” star Saleh Bakri.
Kino Lorber is planning a theatrical release for the film on July 15.
The 32-year-old filmmaker’s haunting and upsetting feature was originally meant to depict a dystopian Lebanon in 2030 at its worst.
“I tried to imagine this dystopian future where none of our problems had been solved and the country was an extreme version of itself,” Akl previously told Arab News.
“It was somehow a way for me to imagine the worst for myself in the same way you sometimes want to explore your trauma in a cathartic way. It was a way for me to imagine the worst in my mind as a way of avoiding the worst happening in my mind and in life.”
But Lebanon’s crisis deepened as Akl and her team got closer to shooting the movie. “The reality of Lebanon became more tragic and more dystopian than even the dystopia that I imagined in 2030,” she said.
In the film, the now trash-filled surroundings of Lebanon’s “Costa Brava” had meant to be the free-spirited Badri family’s getaway utopia from the pollution and social unrest of Beirut. But their dreams were trashed when construction of a landfill site started next door to the family’s home.
Costa Brava is an actual landfill in Lebanon that opened in April 2016 as one of two sites advertised by the Lebanese government as a solution to the eight-month trash crisis the country had experienced the year before. However, within two weeks of its opening, residents and activists launched protests at the site demanding its closure.
