It became obvious that 2019 is the year of Nadine Labaki. The success that this remarkable Lebanese director has been earning with her third film Capernaum is astounding.
The Capernaum director Nadine Labaki continues to move hearts and minds all over the world.
Recently, Labaki won the Arab Cinema Centre (ACC) Awards for the Best Director in 2019 during a ceremony held on the sidelines of the 2019 Cannes festival.
The Arab Cinema Centre (ACC) Awards are given to feature and documentary films that premiered at international film festivals outside of the Arab world during 2018, and at least one of the production companies must be Arab.
“The Arab Cinema Center (ACC) is the first mobile platform that connects, nurtures and promotes the Arab film industry, bridging it with local, regional and international festivals, markets and audiences”
In this regard, Labaki, who is the first Lebanese President- Judge at Cannes’ Festival, announced what’s next on her agenda. She will be producing a feature-length documentary inspired by her Oscar-nominated feature film Capernaum.
As we know by now from the success of her movie, Capernaum followed a 12-year-old boy, Zain, who lives in a Beirut slum where his parents are incapable of taking care of him. He runs away from home and lives for a while with an illegal immigrant from Ethiopia named Rahil.
Speaking about the documentary, Nadine said that she had recorded several reality scenes during the years while shooting Capernaum, and she aims to bring them together in a documentary.
“During the shooting process, fiction really became a reality. The whole process was so interesting and intense that we’re making a documentary about the whole thing, following the characters and where they are now,” she said
In less than a year, Nadine Labaki has been continuously winning and making us proud. A year ago, her movie Capernaum earned a 15-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.
Afterward, the film went on to be nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, with Labaki becoming the first woman from the region to receive that honor.
Later on, Capernaum became an unexpected blockbuster in China, reportedly grossing $44 million in just over two weeks.
