A family lives poorly in a village in the Lebanese mountain. One day the father abandons his family and leaves for Brazil, considered an Eldorado by a great number of his compatriots. Twenty years pass. The mother raised her children with great difficulty: the elder has a family and the younger one is getting ready to immigrate to Brazil. One day a ragged old man arrives to the village.

Georges Nasser was born in Tripoli in 1927. He studied cinema at UCLA in Hollywood and returned to his native country with the firm determination to make films in an environment where the industry was nonexistent.
In 1957 he directed Ila Ayn? (Where to?), which became the first film to represent Lebanon in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Nasser repeated the same remarkable feature with The Little Stranger, also selected at Cannes in 1962. In 1975, Nasser shot his third film Al Matloub Rajol Wahed (It only takes one man) in Syria. Although the film’s future looked promising, the eruption of the Lebanese civil war put an end to its career. 

Nasser began to fight on another front: the creation of a Lebanese union of film technicians, another attempt that proved unsuccessful because of the incompetence of the state and the ministries concerned. 
Nasser finally found a satisfactory vocation as a teacher at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA). 

He passed away in 2019 at the age of 91.

90 mins | 1957
Arabic with English subtitles

The screening is part of the public program of the exhibition ‘Alcântara: The Travels of the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II in the Arab World in 1871 and 1876’, produced by the Embassy of Brazil in Beirut in partnership with Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture, and curated by Roberto Khatlab.