Yara

What would a film look like if it were made without special effects, without "action", without "professional" actors pretending to be what they are not, without superheroes but with real people? Such film would look like Yara, a miraculous and limpid film that reveals the beauty of simple things which the dominant cinema considers as unworthy. Yara is a delicate film, a sweet and melancholic tale of youth, and a perfect antidote to the poison of formatted products that monopolize the screens around the world.

In this new film by the French-Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel, we are faced with a radically simple approach, a story devoid of ornaments, built with the minimum necessary resources, where shines, for example, the austerity of the place and a narration based on very few camera movements, using medium and general shots to always keep the body of nature present. There is something very beautiful in the way the film finds a certain innocence lost in our approach to cinema, far from technical perfectionism and strict rules of the scenario, without forgetting to leave notes on the socio-political context and the influence exercised by religion. Continuing a heritage that goes back to Flaherty, Abbas Fahdel integrates documentary and fiction in the same layer, and moves between the appeal of Kiarostami's cinema and Bresson's cinematograph, and refines both styles to obtain a different one, very personal.

"Yara" invites us to participate in the daily life of the eponymous young girl, who lives with her grandmother in the Lebanese mountains. A tender summer love story, a triumphant celebration of youth and innocence, Yara makes us believe in the possibility of beauty and love. Abbas Fahdel - who wrote, shot, edited and directed the film - captures with great sensitivity and a minimum of narrative contrivance, the details of everyday life in an isolated farm and immortalizes the authenticity of the place and and the people who live there. As in his extraordinary documentary Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015), the Iraqi-French director manages to reveal the truth hidden behind a distant world and the faces of its inhabitants.

Yara is a rare film in the way that it is not encumbered with a classic narrative. Its singular simplicity makes it not a hollow or empty film, but filled with a free space, where the spectator can freely enter and circulate with the characters. These actors and landscapes, so lovingly filmed, seem familiar to us, by the mere presence of a camera that seems inhabited by the belief in its own power. It's pure cinema, because the film, by its absolute faith in the cinema, proves that it does have a power of incarnation that has to do with magic. Yara is the only film I know which, starting by the most concrete reality, reaches a poetic metaphor, almost passing, to put it quickly, from the most raw documentary to the purest fiction.

Filmed in the almost unbearably beautiful mountains of Lebanon, "Yara" is one of the most beguiling films you will see in a month of Sundays, setting out a way of life that might seem as remote as the place where director Abbas Fahdel chose to film it. Yara herself is a young girl who lives in the mountains with her aged grandmother. One day a handsome young man chances by and she is smitten but this is no conventional love story; indeed it's hardly a love story at all but an almost documentary-like account of a region and its people, (all the actors are non-professionals, essentially playing themselves), making do with what many of us might think of as very little yet living in what many of us might think of as a kind of paradise. This is one of the greatest of all films to deal with our place in the natural world, reminding us that great cinema need not necessarily announce itself with fanfares but with the quietude and simplicity of the gentlest of breezes.