Lebanon, Arabic, French, English - 75 min
Feature Documentary Film
TOTAL BUDGET
US $347,752
CONFIRMED FINANCING
US $63,575
CONTACT
angie.obeid@gmail.com
+96170908551
+32487859996
In their newly bought car, Angie (30) takes her father Mansour (70) on the same journey he made 40 years ago from Brussels to Beirut. The path once taken is no longer the same, and nor would be their relationship.
In 1980, 32-year-old Mansour travelled to Belgium with his friends, bought a car, and set off on a long road trip fuelled by love of adventure and discovery back to Lebanon, a country already tired from five years of a 15-year civil war.
Today, 40 years later, Mansour (70) is a retired geo-historian who still lives in Beirut, and has not traveled ever since. It was only after his daughter Angie (30) left to Belgium to study that strong memories of the most adventurous time of his life have suddenly resurfaced. Angie invites her father to Brussels to look for a new car, and go on the same journey he once did.
The path, once taken by Mansour, is no longer the same. Along the 4,000 kilometers once crossed, countries have disappeared and others were born. Some borders have faded, while others have emerged. Dictatorships have risen and fallen. Wars were extinguished and others broke out, causing deaths, destruction and immense displacement along those same roads he once drove across. And Lebanon, caught between the sea and two conflicts, is no longer accessible by land.
The journey of rediscovering the distance between Europe and Lebanon becomes an intimate discovery of the new father/daughter relationship, beyond the borders of the traditional family context they are usually framed in.
My views have seemed to cause enough dismay and worry to my parents that instead of openly expressing and sharing more of myself, I have started to pull away from them as a way of avoiding any interferences.
Today, having chosen to live in Brussels, at a "safe" distance from home, Lebanon, I find myself wanting to shift feelings of mutual disappointment between my father and I, to feelings of mutual acceptance, understanding, and peace.
My father is the only person in my family who shows signs of longing for a more interesting life and traveling beyond the familiar. He often romanticizes and recalls his experience driving from Brussels to Beirut, in 1980.
In Yalla, Baba!, I will embark on a road trip with Mansour, my father, similar to the journey he made 40 years ago. The camera somehow allows me to engage in the harder questions and have a dialogue. By taking this path—which is no longer the same—I see an opportunity to reach out for the young Mansour and understand the decisions he made when he was my age. What I hope for is to have the much needed conversations to find a parallel between us, or even just to agree to disagree.
Yalla, Baba! starts from a particular personal story of a Lebanese father and daughter, which expands to a universal geopolitical level that overviews 40 years of the history of Europe and the world, and questions it.
It would be an understatement to say that Angie Obeid’s first feature I Used to Sleep on the Rooftop and her short film Pacific made a strong impression on us. The beauty of her frames, the attention to details, the deep empathy for her characters; it was clear that we were facing a director with immense talent. Both films have a very beautiful simplicity that seems to be Angie’s signature style. It is the kind of documentary filmmaking we are dedicated in promoting at Savage Film.
The space where her films are set is often confined. In her previous films, it was an apartment or a building. In her new feature Yalla, Baba!, the main space is a car. The setup of the film—two people talking mostly inside of a car moving across a continent—is very simple, yet it enables her to embrace and interlace complex topics, such as European history over the past four decades, and intergenerational differences in viewing life. The huis clos between a father and a daughter drafts an intimate portrait of each of them and their relationship, while their path from Brussels to Beirut enables Angie to outline a socio-cultural and political map of contemporary Europe where she now lives, echoing with the Lebanese society in which she has been raised.
Taking from genres such as road-trip and coming-of-age movies, the film tells a fatherdaughter story that is both very intimate and deeply universal.
2019: Me Miss Me
2018: Nos batailles
2017: Racer and the Jailbird
2016: The Land of the Enlightened
2015: The Ardennes
2011: Bullhead