Feature Film
Skies of Lebanon

Sous le ciel d'Alice


Festival Opening Night Party at 8:30pm

Friday, October 1, 2021
7pm
FIAF Florence Gould Hall



Dir. Chloé Mazlo, 2020, France. 92 min. Color DCP
With Alba Rohrwacher, Wajdi Mouawad, Isabelle Zighondi
In French, Arabic and Italian with English subtitles

Critics’ Week Selection – Cannes Film Festival, 2020

Chloé Mazlo’s first feature is a strikingly original film set in the 1950s and inspired by her family’s life in the years leading into the Lebanese Civil War.

Alice, a young Swiss woman (the ethereal Alba Rohrwacher) is eager to escape her strait-laced home in the Alps by becoming a nanny in Beirut. She soon falls in love with Joseph, a local astrophysicist. The two soon marry and start a family, but their bubbly relationship is upended by the civil war.

Mazlo combines meticulously designed live-action sequences with the occasional offbeat stop-motion scene to create an irresistible picture of the glory days when Beirut was known as “the Paris of the Middle East.”

Trailer

About Chloé Mazlo

Chloé Mazlo is a French-Lebanese filmmaker based in Paris.

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    • After studying graphic design at the Arts Décoratifs school in Strasbourg, she specialized in animated-film directing, working at the intersection of several film techniques. Her short films have been selected for various festivals in France and abroad, and broadcast on television (France 2, Canal+). In 2015, Les Petits cailloux won the César for Best Animated Short Film. Skies of Lebanon is her first feature.