When I first read Zena’s memoir I thought it was the best portrayal of my generation I had ever come across. Global, compassionate, urgent. While reading I was imagining the film, a metaphorical bridge between East and West. A universal story of love between two best friends, on the line of prominent conflicts, in the dusk of the second millennium. The story of Zena and Maya is told in three crucial moments of their lives and friendship; the style of the film matches the point of view of the characters through the subjective eyes of Zena. Youth is a time of fast changes, so is the rhythm at the beginning of the film; colourful, like their coming of age. But the euphoria of liberation soon shows consequences on Maya’s sensitivity to the violence around them.
The pace of the story changes in the devastated beauty of Hasbaya, where Maya experiences her first breakdown, announcing the worst to come. After their decision to move to New York City, their world turns dark and lonely after 9/11, the two “Arab students” feel exiled. And finally, their loss of innocence, and the bleached tension of their adult age during the “July war” of 2006, while Maya fights her diagnosed cancer and Zena remains in a surreal and deserted Beirut under the bombs, to share her last days. The film inherited a key from the book that becomes a stylistic approach to the visuals: in Beirut you live like there is no tomorrow, because you could not be alive the next day. The idea is to describe this aspect of life by blurring the lines between reality and dreams, in what could be defined as a sort of “magic realism”. In the story, Maya has a strong connection to Asmahan, the great Arab diva murdered during WW2. Asmahan will take Zena on a journey to understand Maya’s pain through multiple dream sequences into Mayas’s cycle of reincarnations; a legacy embracing three generations of women living the wars of their time.
During the film we intend to include documentary sequences, either to reveal the internal feelings of the protagonists through the colours of unforgettable memories like the original home movies from Maya’s family, or to contextualize the events with black and white amateur images of war-torn Beirut and hand held video footage of the 2006 war. Beirut eventually becomes a character of its own. I think that this film should give no answers, but rather open questions to disclose the layers of humanity behind the story. Against the ever-present threat of war are Zena, Maya and Beirut.