El Gouna Film Festival

Director

Jude Chehab

Jude Chehab is a Lebanese-American filmmaker whose cinematic interests have drawn her to the exploration of the esoteric, the spiritual and the unspoken. Jude has been credited in collaborations with the BBC, Hot Docs, and Sesame Workshop. Her work has been awarded fellowships through: CAAM, BGDM, NeXtDoc, Points North Institute, Firelight Media, Close-Up and Chicken & Egg. Jude’s first feature documentary has been supported by: IDA, ITVS, TFI, and the Sundance Institute and went on to win the Albert Maysles award for Best New Documentary Director at Tribeca and the Grand Jury Award for Best First Feature at Sheffield DocFest. In 2021, Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Q(2023)

(2023)

Feature Documentary Competition, Lebanon, United States, Arabic, English - 93 min

Director

Jude Chehab

Lebanon, United States | 2023 | 93 min | Arabic, English

Producer Jude Chehab
Production Company Chehab Films LLC
Screenplay Jude Chehab
Cinematography Jude Chehab
Editing Fahd Ahmed
Sound
Cast

About the Film

Director Jude Chehab’s decision to use a single letter as the title of her documentary debut, Q, is a gesture of deliberate ambiguity that reflects the

film's own elusive narrative. The film's story is set in Chehab's own childhood home, where her mother and grandmother belonged to a religious group that encourages Muslim women to join their secret organizations and spread their teachings and values. The group's leaders remain anonymous, and they are referred to simply as "Miss."

The painful end of her mother's experience with the "Miss" had a profound impact on Jude Chehab in her youth. She dedicated all her efforts to please her mother and conform to her behavior. This left a deep psychological scar on her, after the leader changed her mind about her and forcibly expelled her from an organization that she always believed in and worked to spread its ideas in her American exile and in her homeland, Lebanon.

To uncover the mysteries of the relationship between her mother and the “Miss”, Jude alleges she is making a family film about three generations of women in her family (her grandmother, mother, and herself). She understands that the key to understanding the organization lies in these women's stories.

Gradually, Chehab's documentary tabs on critical points that go beyond this. Through her mother’s pain, she explores the difference between healthy religious faith, and the other that is linked to organizations that have their own agendas turning individuals into followers, devoid of will, and as soon as the attitude of its leaders towards them changes, they get expelled from its ranks; left behind to their confusion, feeling torn by doubts. Chehab works to convey those feelings that have seeped into her mother's soul, and which leave their painful marks on the rest of her family, hrough a masterful cinematic work, saturated with he honesty of documentation, free from pretense. It transforms the cinematic achievement into a study of the personal experience that gets revealed as it unfolds.

Kais Kassim

Q (2023)

(2023)

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About the Film

Director

Jude Chehab

Q(2023)

(2023)

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