Simon El Habre / SEMAAN BIL DAY'IA

Simon el Habre
SEMAAN BIL DAY'IA
Lebanon, 2008, HDCam, 86 min

THE ONE MAN VILLAGE
Semaan El Habre, the filmmaker’s uncle, is the sole inhabitant of the village of Ain El-Halazoun. In 1982, the civil war in Lebanon forced the villagers to leave; their houses were destroyed in the conflict. Only Semaan has returned for good. For the past five years he has been living in a house surrounded by ruins, with only his animals and his memories for company. The scars left by the war are not immediately obvious. At first sight, life in the deserted ghost village seems rather idyllic: a snow-covered mountain panorama, a small farm, a content man who loves his cows and who always has a humorous remark on the tip of his tongue. Only gradually do the scars inflicted by the war come to the surface: in the scenery, the history of the El Habre family and in Semaan’s personal life. Each story in the film provides a glimpse of the history of Lebanon and the situation of a country half-way between forgetting and remembering. A film in which horror and beauty, pain and poetry are side by side. An unobtrusive reflection on origins, ties forged with places and people, the consequences of war and the attempt to accept painful memories as part of one’s life.

Simon El Habre

Born in Beirut. In 1998 he obtained his Diploma in Audiovisual Directing from Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) and graduated from Femis (Paris) in Film and Video Editing in 2000. Since 2001 he is teaching Video and Visual Expression as well as Film and Video Editing in ALBA.
He directed a large number of commercials and TV-reportages, mainly for Arab satellite channels MBC, al-Arabia, and al-Jazeera and edited award winning short and documentary films. Simon El Habre is an acclaimed editor in Lebanon and worked, among others, with Ghassan Salhab on his video POSTHUMUS (2007) and his feature film “1958 (SELF PORTRAIT OF YESTERDAY)” (2009).
Simon El Habre is member in the cultural association for the development of cinema, Beirut DC.
Filmography
THE ONE MAN VILLAGE / Semann Bil Day’ia, full length documentary 2008
CHAMBRE 220, (Short) 2000
INSA, (Short) Award for Best Directing - Beirut Film Festival, 1999