The Arab Film Festival Mourns the Passing of Award-winning filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabag
The Arab Film Festival is deeply saddened by the loss of Lebanese filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabag.
Award-winning filmmaker Randa Chahal Sabag passes away in Paris
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, August 27, 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 Infideles” 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. (…)
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 an 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.
