Selim Mourad
Lebanon | 2016 | 104 min
World premiere
Languages : Arabic, French
Subtitles : English, French
Sélim Mourad traces the portrait of a family in which he is trying to find his place. The last descendant, losing his fertility, attracted to men, he is won- dering about filiation and confronts his parents about his obsessions. How do you deal with the responsibility of extinguishing your own family line? Or, just like for this family house in Beirut waiting to be demolished, is there still time to decide otherwise?
A kaleidoscopic family film blending documentary and auto-fiction, This Little Father Obsession sees the complexity of Lebanese society confronted with the personal aspirations of an individual, and the weight of patriarchal tradition with the desire for emancipation. The film carries out its investigation, punctuated with surrealist or baroque tableaux, easily shifting from humour to a more serious tone. And it’s during a search that Selim makes with his father to find a distant relative that the answers arrive, far from those that were expected.
Mourad Moussa
