Nadine Labaki

Nadine Labaki is a Lebanese Film director who is known for her movie Caramel (Sukkar Banat), even though she started her career as a director for Arabic music videos. Her biggest break was in 2003 when she directed a music video for the female icon singer Nancy Ajram. She continued to rise up as director and played small roles in a variety of music videos as well as films; which includes her 1998 short film 11 Rue Pasteur (her graduating project at Beirut's Saint-Joseph University) which won the top prize at an Arabian film festival in Paris (Dawson).

Her first and most noted movie is Caramel. Labaki did not only direct the movie, but wrote the screenplay and took on one of the major roles in the film. Her role as Auteur is very clear in this movie. She did not only write the screen play which makes her the author but she also directed how it will be shot and what kind of characters are used. She stated in an interview that the idea of the movie “was something very personal. It started with something I used to feel and am feeling sometimes, this contradiction between [the fact that] I live in a country that is very modern and exposed to Western culture, and at the same time I'm confused between this culture and the weight of tradition, religion, education and there's always a lot of self-censorship, self-control” (Dawson). As an auteur we see that she does not try to imitate mainstream plots and stereotypes her movie. Rather, she designed her movie to explore contradictions that exist in Lebanese culture, but mainly wanted to break the stereotypes and misconceptions that exist about life in war zones.

The major difference between author and auteur is authors are a creator of a purely literary work while auteurs are the true creators visual narration. For example, if a movie is based on a book, the director of the movie is the true author of everything shown and done in the movie and the author of the real work truly has little influence on the movie. This reality is because a director decides the lighting, camera shots, as well as the expressions given to the characters for the lines they recite. Labaki is not purely an auteur in her film Caramel; this film is actually better categorized with the director Gorris discussed in our readings: Gorris’s imprint is much more subtly autobiographical and marks framing and camera movements…Rather than representing Gorris as some exemplary auteur, feminist literary criticism would make instructively explicit those minute textual places where authorial energies surface (Humm 94). She explains in the interview that the actors were real people that were asked to be themselves with some modifications for the movie. This indicates that it is not the director’s ideas that are solely guiding this movie, but her intention was to discuss real people’s “everday problems.” Therefore as an auteur she did not have full control over the script of the film (Dawson).

Labaki understands that Homosexuality as well as other contradictions in her culture are considered “secret,” because they exist but are not talked about in the public sphere. Her film is all about those issues brought out during a conversation in a beauty Salon where women can be who they are. In addition the Salon represents the only place where women can really go to become beautiful and above all be theirselves and talk about politics, culture, and sexuality. Just like the feminist film Madwoman in the Attic, Labaki’s movie focuses on “women’s subcultures and anxieties of femininity” (Humm 99). The movie received good reviews and is accepted as the most exposed Lebanese film on an international level (NYtimes). One of the reviews I’ve read agrees with the message of the film as well as the plot. The criticism however is about the quality of the actoris and actresses themselves (Berardinelli). Overall the movie is popular and was reliesed in over forty countries, which indicates that it was a success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadine_Labaki
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/01/caramel_director_nadine_labaki.html
http://www.croydonfilms.org.au/Croydon_Films/Nadine_Labaki.html
http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/2008/02/nadine-labaki-caramel.html
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/movies/01cara.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramel_(film)
http://www.reelviews.net/movies/c/caramel.html