An off-the-grid Lebanese family is trashed (literally) by the enduring misfortunes of their homeland in Monia Akl's fiction-feature debut.
Lebanese director Mounia Akl’s compelling, if ultimately shallow, fiction-feature debut begins with the ominous arrival of a statue in the port of Beirut. It’s loaded onto a truck, then moved from the bustling city, where people shout curses as it passes by, to the mountainous countryside, where it will adorn the newly commissioned “green” landfill that just happens to be located next to the cloistered compound of the Badri family.
Patriarch Walid , burned out by the stress of a life of activism and protest, moved to this off-the-grid utopia eight years prior. His outspoken singer wife, Souraya , joined him with their daughter, Tala , who is now a teenager feeling all the usual adolescent stirrings, as well as Walid’s mother, Zeina , who, though humbled by age and illness, is filled to brimming with pithy and pointed opinions. Walid and Souraya’s youngest, 9-year-old Rim , is the only member of the clan who has known nothing but this idyllic existence, which the new, badly managed dump now threatens.
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