Yara

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.

This is a movie about two pristine/virgin beauties - the girls and the valley. Both have only visitors, no inhabitants. Their common theme is desertion. Both have their bears which have to be chased away by rifles. Both are lonely. Wish the acting was up to the mark. The interaction between the joe and her granny lacks any intimacy. More like a documentary was shot with a local old woman and urban actress.

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.

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.

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.