Contents

12
13
P 14 | Alissar Caracalla
P 20 | Anachar Basbous
P 26 | Anissa Helou
P 32 | Bernard Khoury
P 38 | Elie Gharzouzi
P 44 | Flavia Codsi
P 50 | Georges Chakra
P 56 | Guy Manoukian
P 62 | Hany Tamba
P 68 | Hiba Al-Kawas
P 74 | Hussein Madi
P 80 | Iman Humaydan
P 86 | Jean-Claude Boulos
P 92 | Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
P 98 | Khaled Mouzanar
P 104 | Maria Hibri & Hoda Baroudi
P 110 | Michel Eléftériadès
P 116 | Nabil Dada
P 122 | Nabil Gholam
P 128 | Nada Debs
P 134 | Nada Ghazal
P 140 | Nadine Labaki
P 146 | Philippe Skaff
P 152 | Rabih Kayrouz
P 158 | Rabih Mroué
P 164 | Roger Moukarzel
P 170 | Sarah Beydoun & Sarah Nhouli
P 176 | Zuhair Murad
 Nadine Labaki
Secret Dreamer
140
141
 1> Still from the film Caramel, 2007
© May Farra

Secret Dreamer
142
adine Labaki’s recollections laughing she throws a handful of cards
143

N unspool as a series of vibrant

images and stories. She is not so
much remembering as sifting through
into the air.

It was a new experience, Nadine says, for

filmstrips preserved in her mind, splicing
them together to form a more coherent
picture of the life she now leads.
“For me, filmmaking is also about self-
expression,” she says, twisting a purple
hair band around one finger as she
explains why she must write in order to
direct. “It’s about you wanting to express
something that you feel… or a story you
want to tell.”
women to see themselves in a figure who
was “cute, spontaneous, trendy, at ease…
not self-conscious at all.” The video created
a stir, and it became a huge success.
“It was a sort of therapy for me at the
same time,” Nadine adds. “Maybe that’s
why also, I wrote a film about women,
because it was something that I needed
to do, to understand more things about
myself.”

“This waxing thing, this caramel, it becomes
like a sort of witness to these women’s
stories and secrets.”
Seated in a colorful, quilted armchair at
the center of the loft apartment she
shares with her husband, the musician
and film composer Khaled Mouzanar,
Nadine’s appealing, childlike qualities
shine through her womanly features: in
particular, an unselfconscious candour
and vulnerability.
Her face is internationally recognizable
thanks to Caramel – the 2007 film that
she co-wrote, directed, and starred in –
but there is something in her modest
deportment and gentle voice that
suggests she could make herself invisible
if she wanted.
In Nadine’s films, vivid details and
experiences evoke intangible ideas,
sensations, and longings. Her 2003 music
video to “Akhasmak Ah,” (‘I Taunt You’)
introduced themes that are central to her
later work. Pop star Nancy Ajram plays a
waitress who dances, flirts, and plays
cards with the clientele of a traditional
Egyptian café. Men cheer as Nancy tosses
and fluffs a luscious mane of dark curls;
Set in the present day, the film, Caramel
(‘Sukkar Banat’), tells several, interlinked
stories enacted in and around a Beirut
beauty parlor. It is one of the first
contemporary Lebanese films not to
revolve around the country’s Civil War.
Nadine’s memories of her mother and
the neighbors gathering in their kitchen
for a waxing ritual inspired the film’s
dominant motif – the thick, heated paste
of sugar, lemon juice, and water is equally
a means to pain, pleasure, and beauty.
“This waxing thing, this caramel, it
becomes like a sort of witness to these
women’s stories and secrets,” she says.
The film begins at the layer that the wax
exposes and makes its way inwards.
During Nadine’s childhood, war often
forced her to stay home and it indirectly
sharpened her powers of observation.
She most looked forward to turning on
the television, even before the color bars
dissolved into images in the late
afternoon. >

Secret Dreamer
144
145 >“Life for me became a little bit boring,”
she recalls. “Watching films was my only
escape.”
Nadine’s and her younger sister
Caroline’s mutual attachment to film
echoes their father’s youthful aspirations.
An electrical engineer by trade, he spent
many pleasant hours in the small movie
theater that his father once operated in
their building in Baabdat.
Even during the family's three-year
sojourn in Canada, Mr. Labaki often
talked with his two girls (now both
directors) about how much he loved
visiting the projection booth just to smell
the rolls of film.
“I never saw it,” Nadine says of the
“Maybe that's why also, I wrote a film theater. “I don’t even have pictures of it.
It’s just an idea that I have, an image in
about women, because it was something my head.” Her decision to make films
that I needed to do, to understand more materialized in much the same way – an
about myself.” ethereal image floating in developing
solution until, once fully exposed, it
pointed her toward an audiovisual degree
at Beirut’s Université Saint-Joseph.
The program pushed Nadine and her
peers to experiment across the medium:
“Go and make a film, go and make a
documentary, go and make a music
video.” Directing instantly felt natural to
her. In acting class, though, Nadine hid
so the teacher wouldn’t notice her and
ask her to perform.
Later, that changed. “There was a click
somewhere, and I understood that it was
interesting also to be able to become
someone else for a while,” she says. “It’s
the only legitimate place where you can
1> Still from the film Caramel, 2007
© May Farra
experiment on this level, and when I
discovered that, I started to enjoy it.”
The first short film she directed (also her
diploma project) played out in one 13-
minute shot as viewers looked through
the scope of the main character’s rifle and
into the lives of his neighbors.
The film, 11 Rue Pasteur, won several
international prizes, including best
short film at the 1997 Beirut Film
Festival, and gave Nadine confidence.
But, she didn’t feel that she had the
maturity or the experience to work
immediately as a filmmaker.
Instead, she found a job as a television
producer at an advertising agency. After
two and a half years, she went freelance
directing ads, and a friend persuaded her
to bring her own ideas to the music
video industry. “It’s very tempting to say
yes to advertising, to say yes to music
videos,” Nadine says. “So, I was very lazy,
and I wouldn’t start writing until I met
my producer.”
In 2004, a mutual friend introduced
Nadine to French producer Anne-
Dominique Toussaint, then in Beirut to
present a film at the annual European
Film Festival. After Anne-Dominique
left, she began writing Nadine e-mails,
prodding her to put something down
on paper.
On Anne-Dominique’s advice, Nadine
applied and was accepted as a resident
by the Cannes Film Festival’s
Cinefondation. She spent six months in
Paris developing “this idea of women in
a beauty institute.”
 2> Poster photo for Caramel, 2007
© May Farra

Anne-Dominique would often visit her room to check on her

progress. “I never gave her something to read,” Nadine says. “I
would just tell her the story and act the story. And she liked it,
and, you know, when I finished, she said, ‘Yes, I’m in.’”

On returning to Beirut, Nadine continued writing with two

good friends, Jihad Hojeily and Rodney El Haddad. “It’s like
Ping-Pong,” she says, explaining her preference for
collaboration. “You have people who respond, react to what
you say. You react to what they’re saying. I think it’s a very
healthy way of working.”

When it came time to cast the film, she went looking for
first-time performers. “I wanted to experiment with reality,”
she says. “That’s why I chose people who are not actors. I
didn’t ask them to act. I just wanted them to be themselves
in certain situations.”

The choice sheds light on an important aspect of Nadine’s

character. Her own inner life also acts as a mirror reflecting
the hidden depths of those around her; she longs to see what’s
beneath the surface.

“When I meet new people, I start imagining their life – how

they are when they’re at home – and wondering if they’re
happy or not,” she says.

The July 2006 war started a week after the film shoot finished.
Traveling to France for the post-production, Nadine felt like
a traitor. “You’re leaving everybody behind to work on a film
that did not talk about war,” she says. “It spoke about women
and colors and warmth and Beirut on a sunny day.”

Within days of Caramel’s debut at Cannes, it had sold to over

30 countries. A few months later, Nadine married the film’s
composer in a forest between their home villages.

The two of them have been traveling from festival to festival,

but Nadine is already at work with the same collaborators
on a new screenplay. The whirl is an apt metaphor for how
to move forward once you have an idea of where you’re
headed – at a brisk pace and looking back only so as to
better grasp the future. I
P32-49cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:19 AM Page 32
Bernard Khoury
Critical Devices
32
hat remains Bernard Khoury’s
33
W best-known project, the after-
hours nightclub BO18,
emerges unexpectedly, gloriously, from
the bloodstained ground of Karantina.
Almost invisible by day, the club comes
to life after dusk, its roof ascending like
the lid of a vampire’s coffin, exposing a
cavernous, underground interior that
pulses with life in the hours before dawn.
BO18’s inventive design is darkly
moody and unapologetically decadent
if stripped down, inviting club goers to
indulge in peace, even as it brusquely
dismisses the “naïve amnesia that
governs post-war reconstruction.” Built
eight years after the end of the Lebanese
Civil War, the club reenergized Beirut’s
nightlife and revived a career that
Bernard had all but abandoned.
“This was an opportunity that spoiled
me, because the scenario was so
fantastic, and I don’t think it will ever
happen again,” he says. Shares in the
club generated enough income to
finance his architectural practice for
three years. In 2001, thanks to BO18,
Bernard received an honorable mention
of the Borromini Prize, a prestigious
Italian award given to architects under 40
years of age.
But Bernard’s talking about more than
money or fame. He’s talking about a
perfectly realized chemical equation, an
experience so intense that it thrust the
paper-bound preoccupations of his
school days into a real-world kiln that
reduced them to their essentials. The
ideas that first made him genuinely
excited about architecture? They needed
some adjustments, he discovered, but
they could work.
The same might be said about Bernard
himself. The youngest son of two
architects, he has spent most of his life
living inside walls built by his father,
Khalil Khoury, and he assumed from an
early age that he’d join the profession.
An indifferent student, Bernard preferred
riding a motorbike to studying. “I was a
lost case,” he says of his last few years of
high school. “I was kicked out from one
school to the other.”
The Rhode Island School of Design
admitted him to its architecture
program in 1986 because his eldest
brother pulled strings with a trustee. “I
was thrown there and I had to perform,
boom, because I simply had no other
choice,” he says.
At first, that only meant passing. Bernard
describes himself then as a “mediocre”
student who shrugged off suggestions
from several professors that he consider
a different career, largely because he’d
never seriously contemplated any other
path. Alienated by the academy, he took
solace in riding his motorbike with a
pack of diverse friends.
It’s not hard to see why Terry Gilliam’s
1985 film, Brazil – a tragi-comic fantasy
about a low-level government employee
battling an autocratic system – might
have appealed to Bernard. He’s since
seen it about 30 times.
The summer before his last year, the US
went to war in the Persian Gulf.>
P32-49cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:19 AM Page 33
P32-49cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:19 AM Page 34

Critical Devices
34
35
“Beirut was a diving board… a sort of short
cut to try to go at it alone, immediately,
without any prior professional experience.”
>Frustrated by the ignorance around
him, Bernard found an outlet in
architecture. In collaboration with a
young critic, he imagined a series of
temporary mobile structures that
collect and store information to help
political groups and students talk with
each other.
This project, “Architecture in
Opposition,” incorporates many of the
ideas and principals that have followed
Bernard throughout his career. Based
on a clear concept that is strategic, not
representational, it operates as a device
that shapes and is shaped by a
politically charged context.
“This is a project I could have described
to you over the phone without the use of
a picture,” he says. Drawing becomes a
tool that enables an architect “to question
what you’re doing constantly, and purge
your project until you’ve really narrowed
it down to what is essential.”
Newly engaged with his work, he
enrolled in a two-year Master’s
program at Harvard University in 1991.
On graduating, he launched his own
practice in Lebanon. He had space in
his father’s furniture factory, a reliable
source of technical advice from his
father’s employees, and a donated PC.
“Beirut was a diving board… a sort of
short cut to try to go at it alone,
immediately, without any prior
professional experience,” he says.
Bernard’s first commissions came from
family connections. “So it was more of a
social thing, because I had a nice degree,”
he says. “I was a Harvard graduate, so
people thought I was smart, but they
realized very quickly that they were
wrong when I didn’t give them what they
wanted.” Each of 16 consecutive
commissions failed to make it to
construction.
Shortly after he married, three years
and three months after he’d come back
home to be an architect, Bernard
decided to drop the profession and
move to New York in 1996.
Unexpectedly, during a visit home a
year later, a friend asked him to help
create a nightclub.
A decade later, Bernard’s work-life
appears entirely transformed. He
surrounds himself with young
architects and spends his office time –
mostly late afternoon into night – in a
wheeled chair, rolling from one work
station to another across the slick,
blood-red floor of a vast, open space.
Whereas BO18 consumed all of
Bernard’s attention every day for about
six months, his current team may carry
as many as 20 projects at once in diverse
locales, each of which will take years to
complete. “It’s like having sex with
10 women at the same time,” he says.
After BO18, Bernard designed several
more eye-catching entertainment
centers that simultaneously shield
visitors from post-war realities and
comment on them. A metallic mesh
preserves the decaying façade of the
1920s structure that houses Centrale, a
restaurant and elevated tubular bar.
Yabani, a skylit underground Japanese
restaurant with a velvet-boothed>
P32-49cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:19 AM Page 35

1> Yabani- Japanese restaurant and bar,

Ashrafieh
© DW5 Bernard Khoury

2> Centrale- French restaurant and bar,

Ashrafieh
© DW5 Bernard Khoury
1 2
P32-49cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:19 AM Page 36
Critical Devices
36
37
“This was an opportunity that spoiled me, >elevator core and a decorative tower,
because the scenario was so fantastic, and acts as a landmark for a “fraction of a
society living in marvelous denial.”
I don’t think it will ever happen again.”
His firm DW5 now takes on more banks
and high-end residential developments,
the daily bread of the architect working
in Lebanon and the Gulf. “I’ve learned
to enjoy the not obviously interesting
work,” he says. “If you want to survive in
this kind of environment, I think it’s a
good strategy.”
Bernard and his collaborators seek to
defy standards that exist only for their
own sake. “I’ve never been in a hospital
that is really pleasant – why?” he says.
“Because there are ‘standards’… and
this is how you build a hospital. The
same thing applies every time you hit a
large scale development.”
It’s also important to him to find ways to
celebrate otherwise banal experiences.
For instance, Bernard has redesigned the
interior of his house so that his
bathroom becomes his bedroom, and he
showers looking out on the living room,
where his son sleeps in his own log cabin.
Success has made Bernard more
confident, but it has also made him
more vigilant. If a project doesn’t feel
right, he’ll walk away. “Sometimes we
really needed work, and were in serious
financial trouble and walked out of, or
did not take projects, because it is not
the fee that drives us. Certainly not,” he
says. “One project can burn you.”
Concern for his reputation hasn’t made
Bernard any less candid. His website
lists many of his aborted projects, and
an odd, eye-catching showcase to them
dominates his office floor. A black,
circular UFO-shaped device suspended
from the ceiling in his office serves as a
“cemetery of our works that never
made it to construction,” he says.
This humorous, if morbid, creation
seems to cast a sly glance back at young
Bernard, the rebel battling his own
medium. Inside the space pod, images of
aborted projects stream simultaneously
on multiple television screens.
On slipping into a harness, a person is
hoisted upwards; their head enters the
device’s body, while their feet dangle in
mid-air. Until they decide to come
down, they are lost in space, unbound
from gravity, the punch line to
Bernard’s cosmic joke at architecture’s
expense. I
P14-31cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:16 AM Page 14

Alissar Caracalla
Original Roots
14
15
P14-31cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:16 AM Page 15
P14-31cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:16 AM Page 16

1> Ballet, Two Thousand and One

Nights, London, Peacock Theatre, 2003
© Caracalla Dance Theatre

Original Roots
16
he wonder of dance has always pretentious were she not also warm and
17

“When you create a show, it’s not like you

T lifted Alissar Caracalla up, but in
the winter of 1996, it threw her
down in what must have seemed a cruel
down to earth.

Like many choreographers, Alissar

take it to the office and then leave it there.
It goes home with you.”
joke. While performing with her
family’s dance troupe, the Caracalla
Dance Theatre, she fell and popped a
ligament during the production of
Alissar: Queen of Carthage (an homage
to her namesake). That meant eight
months in a cast, and it put an
imminent audition for graduate school
in limbo.
“So I started to cry and said, ‘That’s it, I
can’t go to UCLA.’ But, my dad said, ‘Just
go on your crutches,’” Alissar recalls. She
choreographed a – “probably pathetic” –
one-legged routine and danced for about
five minutes before a jury of seven
people. They gaped.
“If I wasn’t on crutches, I probably
wouldn’t have gotten in,” Alissar
confides with happy relief. “I probably
was not up to the technical, perfect level
that you would need to get into that
department, but showing up from
Lebanon on crutches and a green cast
all the way up to the knee, I think I blew
the jury’s mind away.”
Still billed in programs as Caracalla’s
“new choreographer,” Alissar has been
collaborating with her father, the
company’s founder and artistic director,
since that fateful 1996 production, but
has danced small roles in shows since
she was a child. When she talks about
the company and her father, Abdel-
Halim Caracalla, the natural drama of
her diction amplifies and she speaks
with a reverence that would seem
radiates self-control, but in telling her
story, she betrays a private vulnerability
that makes one thing clear: her self-
assurance is hard-won, not inborn, no
matter her pedigree.
As her father’s likely successor (in
concert with her elder brother, Ivan,
who has directed many shows and
transformed the company technically),
Alissar is deeply aware of both the joy
and responsibility that she stands to
inherit, and that awareness has given
rise to two distinct personas.
She’s Alissar, of course, ever the “girly
girl” with the immaculate manicure,
the obsessive yoga practice, and the
fondness for cold espresso. But she’s
also Caracalla – that is, one of the
newer public faces of a 41-year-old
legacy that employs more than 100
people and touches thousands across
the world.
“The company no longer belongs to us;
the company is an expression of art that
belongs to the people. So, if you’re going
to get to work here, you better know
what you’re doing, because it has a
history,” she says gravely. Alissar clearly
loves talking about that history, all of it
her history – even the acts that unfolded
when, in a manner of speaking, she
waited in the wings.
As a young man, Alissar’s father had
studied at the Graham school in the
United Kingdom, and he founded his>
P14-31cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:16 AM Page 17

2> Ballet, Nights of the Moon,

Casino du Liban, 2008
© Caracalla Dance Theatre

2
P14-31cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:16 AM Page 18

1> Bolero de Ravel

© Caracalla Dance Theatre

Original Roots
18
19 The Lost Glory (1997), and Zayed & The
Dream (2008). “It’s very much like an
opera that moves, but moves very
gracefully and beautifully,” Alissar says.

According to Alissar, Caracalla is a

company made for Lebanon, whose
people harbor a fondness for dabke –
the Levant’s traditional folkloric dance
– but who have typically lacked the
wider appreciation for professional
dance that is common to other regions.

She and her brother grew up in a

rarefied environment, surrounded by
poets, musicians, costume designers,
and, of course, dancers. “When you
create a show, it’s not like you take it to
the office and then leave it there,” she
points out. “It goes home with you.”

Or it follows you on the road. When

“You also need a very specific physique
to be a professional dancer, which I never
really had. So I was just getting into it
because I loved it so much.”
>traditional folkloric company in 1968,
six years before Alissar’s birth.
What began as a band of 12 has
transformed into a theatrical extravaganza:
an assortment of dazzlingly costumed
dancers, actors, and singers crisscrossing
spectacular sets in mass choreographies
enlivened by original music or classic
compositions reimagined for Oriental
instruments.
The company spends two years
preparing each ballet, such as Oriental
Taming of the Shrew (1982), Andalusia,
Alissar turned two, her mother took the
children to live in London, but her dad
stopped in every month and they often
flew to meet the company wherever it
was performing. At age 13, the family
spent Christmas and the New Year
living in tents with the nomadic
Tuaregs in the Algerian desert, while her
father researched a new production.
Caracalla had became so well known
and so well loved that, throughout the
Lebanese Civil War, its dancers were
allowed to pass back and forth across
the Green Line regardless of their
various religious sects.
In London, Alissar spent evenings and
weekends in Covent Garden attending
dance classes, but she didn’t intend to
dance professionally. “You also need a
P14-31cor7:Layout 1 11/18/09 11:16 AM Page 19
very specific physique to be a
professional dancer, which I never really
had,” she says. “So… I was just getting
into it because I loved it so much.”
After earning Bachelor’s degrees in
international communication and
dance from Los Angeles’s Loyola
Marymount University in 1995, she
returned to Lebanon to take a break
before continuing her studies. She
decided to revive a dance school that
the war had forced her father to close,
drawing on her experience attending
classes at Hollywood studios.
Alissar wanted to create a space where
Lebanese could train to become
professional dancers, but she didn’t
want to cater only to those with the
perfect turnout, bone length, and body
image. The Ashrafieh-based school now
counts about 2,000 students, about half
of whom study style Caracalla, an
amalgam of folk and modern dance.
Alissar decided only after graduate
school that she wanted to work with
the company. “There’s nothing better
than to show your tradition and your
roots,” she says. A few years after she
returned to Caracalla, she also made a
name for herself in 2002 as the
choreographer for the popular
Lebanese reality television show, Star
Academy. The professional dancers of
her own Orientalist Dance Company
perform on the show and participate in
her other commercial work.
Choreographing for television differs
substantially from its theater
counterpart. “Camera is all ‘show me
2> Ballet, Two Thousand and One
Nights, London, Peacock Theatre, 2003
2 © Caracalla Dance Theatre
3> Ballet, Villager's Opera, Baalbeck
International Festival, 2009
© Caracalla Dance Theatre
3
the money,’ and ‘very wow,’” Alissar
says. “Whereas theater” – dramatic
pause – “is life, as Shakespeare said.”
Alissar hasn’t had time to perform since
2002, but she now choreographs most
of each company show. “When you
choreograph, it’s like giving birth to
something, and your dancers become
you and you become them,” she says.
Alissar’s father generally takes care of
the broad strokes, while she composes all
the dancers’ individual movements.
Sometimes they divide the choreography,
but that can be confusing for the dancers
and it can pit two strong personalities
against one another.
“I do what I do, he does what he does.
We clash a lot, but we kind of do a u-
turn and meet in the middle,” Alissar
says. “He’s pushier now, because he
knows I can be more specific. But at the
beginning, he kind of let me express
myself, and also it was a test to see how
far we can go together, and it was a great
success.”
For Alissar and the many members of
the Caracalla dance tribe, the Caracalla
Theatre in Sin el-Fil is home and
headquarters. Set pieces and posters
from old shows make up a family photo
album of sorts. The space feels grand,
familiar, and timeless.
One evening, the pair glides arm in
arm across the entryway, gripped by a
warm camaraderie in the midst of
swirling activity. To glimpse them is to
doubt that there could be any other
outcome. I