L'Étoile bleue
Valentin Noujaïm
France, Qatar, Lebanon | 2020 | 17 min
World premiere
Languages : Arabic, French
Subtitles : English, French
He speaks Arabic, he is dark skinned, and he loves a white woman. This Lebanese man, tired of suffering the violence of a country where he is only a foreigner, implores the sky, which promises him a world in which he would finally find his place. Between diary and science-fiction, Valentin Noujaïm retraces the history of his family.
“On a night like this, a man cried out, the man was tired of being different, of being foreign. Far away in universe, someone heard his call.” The film opens with the account of this cry, a desperate one as perhaps all cries from exile are. The story of a “brown man” who has dared to love a white woman. He speaks Arabic, his wife speaks French, their distant voices intermingle, like a murmur, to tell us about their banished love. Valentin Noujaïm plunges into the family archives to question their story as immigrants into France, a country where they have never really managed to find their place. The film starts with images bearing witness to an apparently happy past—the emergence of a forbidden love, holidays at the seaside…—but this happiness will quickly turn to despair. This Lebanese man exhausted following the rejection by his new country, implores the sky which shows him a parallel universe. A promised world for those who cannot find their place on earth. The family film thus becomes a fantastic account and a political tale of unhoped for colour. A blue star.
Elena López Riera
