Photo: Chadi Zineddine's Falling from Earth
An oblique rumination on the psychological and emotional wreckage wrought by years of war in Beirut, Falling from Earth is much symbolic gesturing in the dark. That director Chadi Zeneddine makes no concession to traditional narrative is hardly a failing, but his refusal to contextualize his evocative imagery except in the slimmest of ways (i.e. by denoting that his film's four "chapters" are set in different decades) dampens their ability to reverberate on an individual or collective scale. The influence of and yearning for home, the past, love, and a voice (both personal and political) are topics that freely commingle throughout these tales, which involve an old man named Youseff who collects photographs for display in his bombed-out apartment, a young girl who asks Santa for a video camera, a security guard who begins writing on the door of a public bathroom stall, and a woman remembering a former romance. Nick Schager
An oblique rumination on the psychological and emotional wreckage wrought by years of war in Beirut, Falling from Earth is much symbolic gesturing in the dark. That director Chadi Zeneddine makes no concession to traditional narrative is hardly a failing, but his refusal to contextualize his evocative imagery except in the slimmest of ways (i.e. by denoting that his film's four "chapters" are set in different decades) dampens their ability to reverberate on an individual or collective scale. The influence of and yearning for home, the past, love, and a voice (both personal and political) are topics that freely commingle throughout these tales, which involve an old man named Youseff who collects photographs for display in his bombed-out apartment, a young girl who asks Santa for a video camera, a security guard who begins writing on the door of a public bathroom stall, and a woman remembering a former romance. Nick Schager
