Maroun Bagdadi

A biography of the late filmmaker, Maroun Bagdadi, portraying the stages of his life, excerpts from his interviews and films until the very last moments of his life.

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During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera, and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"

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Who would have expected Brigitte to marry a prisoner with a long sentence in the first place? In this romantic action movie, that is only the first in a long line of surprising actions by the young woman. Somehow, she manages to get hooked to the young prisoner before realizing that he'll be locked up for another three or four decades. She decides that this is much too long to wait to spend time with her sweetheart and decides to learn how to fly a helicopter. Why? So she can fly in and take him out of his prison yard, which is exactly what she does, thrilling romantics all over France and seriously upsetting the authorities. This award-winning film is based on a true incident from 1986.

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Patrick Perrault, a photo-journalist covering the war in Beirut in the late 1980s, is himself caught up in the hostilities when one day he is picked up and bundled into a car at gun-point. Blind-folded, he is taken to an unknown location where he discovers that he is being taken hostage by Lebanese guerrillas.

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Doctor Fournier arrives in Beirut as the civil war is raging. He finds himself with a colleague working in a hospital controlled by a Shiite militia and treating the injured. Driven by his doctor’s oath, he crosses the demarcation line to treat Christian casualties of the ongoing clashes. This causes Muslims in his neighborhood to brand him a traitor. He is kidnapped to be exchanged for a fighter captured by Christian militiamen. The film is part of the TV series *Médecins des hommes *(*Doctors of men*). It was considered the best movie in the series.

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Claire (Laure Marsac) is a 16-year-old young woman who discovers her father Pierre (Bernard Giraudeau) is not a healing physician but a killer with a bloody war record in the Lebanese conflict. She runs away from home and into the arms of Kamal (Michal Albertini). While Pierre stalks two terrorists, Claire and Kamal are violently confronted by Kamal's abandoned wife and family. The ravages of the conflict extend to those who are never participants in the battle but are among the casualties of war.

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Beirut resident Soraya is drawn to two men: daredevil photographer Nabil and Talal, who must embrace his feudal heritage when his father is kidnapped.

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Tribute to the Druze Kamal Jumblatt, Minister of Economy and Agriculture (1946) and founder of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in 1949. He was one of the architects of the departure of President Bechara el-Khoury (1952), before playing a major role in the events of 1958. From 1960 to 1964, Kamal Jumblatt assumed, under the presidency of Fouad Chehab, various ministerial functions . . After the conflict of June 1967, he gradually approached the Palestinian organizations. In 1969 he became Minister of the Interior; in August 1970, he supported the election of Soleiman Frangié as President of the Republic. Following the Lebanese-Palestinian clashes of May 1973, he took sides against the head of state, established himself as the leader of the National Movement in 1975 and engaged in a revolutionary armed struggle against the Lebanese Front. Hostile to Syria's intervention in Lebanon, he broke with it (March 1976). He was assassinated near a Syrian checkpoint in 1977.

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In the aftermath of the 1967 defeat, four young Lebanese try to figure out their places in a society whose rules seem to have changed. It proved to be an extraordinary anticipation of the civil war that would engulf the country while the film was being edited.

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