Nadine Labaki

Nadine Labaki (born 18 February 1974) is a Lebanese actress, director and activist. ¹ Her third feature, Capernaum (2018), won the Jury Prize at Cannes and made her the first female Arab director nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. ¹

She was born in Baabdat, Mount Lebanon Governorate, to Maronite parents, Antoine and Antoinette Labaki; her father is an engineer and her mother a homemaker. ¹ Her parents' Maronite Christianity is their attested background, not an attestation of a religion for Labaki herself: the article names no religion for her personally, and this museum records her faith as unknown. ¹ She spent her first seventeen years in wartime Lebanon, learned storytelling from her uncle, the family hakawati, and began her career in 1990 with the talent show Studio El Fan, winning a prize for directing music videos. ¹ Fleeing the war in 1989, she spent three years in Montreal and obtained Canadian citizenship. ¹

She obtained a degree in audiovisual studies at Saint Joseph University in Beirut; her 1997 graduation film, 11 Rue Pasteur, won Best Short Film at the Biennale of Arab Cinema in Paris. ¹ She is unusual among Lebanese and Arab filmmakers in not having been educated or trained abroad. ¹ She went on to direct advertisements and acclaimed music videos for Middle Eastern singers, including Nancy Ajram. ¹

Written during a six-month Cannes Film Festival Residence in 2005, Caramel (2006–2007), in which she also played a leading role, follows five Lebanese women who gather at a Beirut beauty salon and deal with love, sexuality, tradition and disappointment. ¹ It premiered at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2007, was a commercial success, and put her on Variety's 10 Directors to Watch list. ¹

Her second feature (2011) treats, with humour, a war-ravaged village in which Muslim and Christian women try to keep their men from starting a religious war — an idea that came to her while pregnant in 2008, as Lebanon stood at the brink of violent turmoil. ¹ The film's religious subject is its subject, not evidence about its director's own faith. ¹ It premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and won the People's Choice Award at Toronto. ¹

Capernaum (2018) tells of a 12-year-old boy in the slums of Beirut who sues his parents for bringing him into a world of suffering; Labaki researched the city's children for years and cast mostly non-professional actors, including the Syrian refugee child Zain Al Rafeea. ¹ The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, a first for a female director. ¹

She is fluent in Arabic, French, English and Italian, married the musician and composer Khaled Mouzanar in 2007, and has two children. ¹ In 2016 she received an honorary degree from the American University of Beirut and stood as a candidate for the Beirut Madinati movement in the capital's local elections, which won about 40 per cent of the vote but no seats. ¹

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