Mira Shaib’s feature film debut, ARZE, chronicles the story of Lebanese mother Arzé (Diamand Abou Abboud) as she searches for a stolen motorcycle on the streets of sectarian Beirut. The motorbike was a gift to rebellious teenage son Kinan (newcomer Bilal Al Hamwi) so he could deliver Arzé’s spinach pies (lovingly monikered as Kinan Snack), their sole source of income. Arzé and Kinan struggle to get information about the bike due to their Greek orthodox beliefs, so they change their accents and religious garb to assimilate into the varied factions, all while a civil rights protest occurs in the city. Riffing on Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neo-realist classic BICYCLE THIEVES, Shaib’s film is striking, humorous and the characters are captured as fully realised human beings while astutely challenging the notion of sectarianism and capitalism. Shaib sat down with film critic Connor Lightbody to discuss the film’s premiere at 2024’s Tribeca Film Festival, comparing her award-winning short film LILACS to ARZE, and getting renowned Lebanese actress Abboud to star in her debut feature.

Connor Lightbody: How does it feel to have your film premiere at Tribeca?

Mira Shaib: Honestly, it’s an affirmation of work that we’ve been trying to get out for a long time. So, you know, when you really love movies and making movies, one you’ve been working for some time, then you get into one of the biggest festivals, and you see the reaction of the people, it’s like an affirmation that you did a good job. And seeing the reviews, and even the laughs and how people reacted in the cinema. I can’t tell you how it feels; I just feel honoured that I was able to put a smile on people’s faces. To hear some things like they were refreshed after the movie was done, that they came out with some hope. The films from our region are [often] very dramatic or sad stories and we were able to mix both worlds. It means a lot. And I’m so proud and happy that we were finally able to screen it.

CL: The film was once called I AM ARZE but is now just ARZE. What prompted this change?

MS: When you want to switch it to Arabic, it’s weird. It starts to change. I like to have the same title in Arabic and English, in a way. So even my short film, LILACS, is still Lilacs in Arabic. I like to have the same meaning, so that it won’t change a lot. So when you want to say it in Arabic, it just doesn’t work. Going to places and saying “I am Arze” was weird, you know? So it was a collective conversation, and we all agreed to keep it as Arze. It was stronger in a way because it means ‘the cedar tree’. So when you just see the name without knowing anything, you’re like, “Oh, what do they mean? Are they doing a movie about a cedar tree, or what’s happening?”

CL: I like that a lot, because the character of Arze has her roots in different places and has to branch out so it really works. I’m glad you mentioned LILACS. You have a character called Firas who is kidnapped in the film, and in ARZE you have Arze’s sister Layla, who is dealing with her fiance being kidnapped. Can you speak on why you chose to cover this, is being kidnapped a prominent issue in Lebanon?

MS: Yeah, it’s an issue that is actually not very spoken about. The government has always tried to bury it in a way. My family was living through the civil war and I grew up hearing a lot about those stories about the people who got kidnapped. One person from my family actually got kidnapped, and then my dad was able to get him back. So, it was always part of the family, but when I grew older, I realised that there are some stories that we don’t speak about in the country. I was one of the main activists against the government, so I always wanted to make stories that people want to say, that the families want to say, but the government always tries to shut down. I remember in one of the protests I was in, I saw a woman in a tent, and she had a lot of pictures. Back then I was like, why don’t I just go and speak to her. She was doing coffee for us the whole time, and helping us with some food. She just had one tent in the middle of a big area where we were protesting. And when I went to talk to her she told me that her son was kidnapped in the 80s and she is still in this camp protesting, waiting for her son to come back knowing that he is dead. So this is what inspired the story and what made me want to do more research. I went around and spoke to a lot of people and organisations, and we realised that this is a huge issue: that Lebanese citizens were getting kidnapped by the Syrian regime during the civil war in the 80s and 90s, and to this second some families are still hoping that they would get their sons or their husbands or any one of their family members back. But the government is still not doing anything about it. So, as a person who speaks a lot about social issues and loves to shed light on problems, women’s issues, social issues, political issues, this was one of the things that clouded my mind for so long and it is so sad that we haven’t spoken about it. So I did that in LILACS, and then when Sam Shaib (writer for ARZE) and I were writing Arze, they used that part and integrated it into ARZE.

“I realised that there are some stories that we don’t speak about in the country […] so I always wanted to make stories that people want to say, that the families want to say, but the government always tries to shut down.”

CL: I found the two films to feel like companion pieces. LILACS follows the search for a kidnapped brother, while ARZE follows the search for a son’s motorbike. They’re both in roundabout ways about family ties and maintaining those connections after being kidnapped or having a bike stolen. What inspires you and your writing partners to imbue your films with these quite striking familial themes?

MS: Growing up in Lebanon, it felt like we were always chasing something. There’s always something that is missing and we’re trying to find it, where it is an identity, or if it is a story, we’re not getting the real answers behind it. So, in a way it’s part of who I am as a person. I always like to make stories, especially about a woman trying to find strength. It is a misogynistic society, so you don’t see that happening every day. Looking back at my childhood and seeing, for example, my mom trying to find the answers for something that’s happening in the family. Or trying to find the kidnapped family member. We’re living in a universe and a country that is so small, but we’re still trying to find questions for everything. So, in a way we had two women characters that are always searching for something whether it’s a bike or whether it’s a brother, but they’re always looking for something and this is a theme that I would want to always try to integrate in my movies. Because it is something that’s very relatable.

CL: The cut to black at the end of LILACS caught me off-guard, where you find the brother dead and it’s now just a bureaucratic process. It was very emotional to see her search come up short in a way, to find him dead after all that.

MS: Because there are no answers. Like, I didn’t have an answer. There’s nothing that has been done, still to this second, and it’s scary to the families.

CL: That’s why I asked the question. I like to think I’m quite politically aware but this wasn’t something I was aware of.

MS: Because they want to bury these stories. The government doesn’t care about those families, or really anything regarding our country.

CL: What I really liked about both ARZE and LILACS are the little inflections that your characters have with each other. In LILACS, it’s the hesitant hug between your protagonist and her father, which says so much about their relationship instantly; and in ARZE it’s the small, patient smile that Arze has when making pies with her sister Layla. Your characters feel real, and they feel like complicated humans. Can you touch on what drives you specifically to add those touches to your films?

MS: I grew up watching my mom, my aunt, my sister, old women in a way struggling to make ends meet, or women who are struggling to make it work with their fathers, or with their husbands, and relationships that were failing. Every single story from my family has inspired every single character that you have seen. And as you saw, even if I didn’t write, my brother Sam wrote it and they also have the same experience that I shared, which is they didn’t have a father figure that was there to support them. That created the love for writing woman characters, and showing how complex it is to be making a living and to be respected, especially in our society. Because both women were not respected. LILACS, it’s with her father, who never respected her mother or her. And in ARZE, it’s all the men that surrounded her, even her husband who left her. So in a way it was all these real life experiences that I saw. That’s how those characters were created. The complexity of these characters are coming from real-life situations.

CL: I think even Kinan, in that same ballpark, has some kind of internalised misogyny when he’s talking to his mother.

MS: Yeah, Kinan wants to be a traditional man, especially when he tells her I’m the man of the house, that I want to take care of the house. Like you’re barely 18, calm down. And I mean, that’s how they all are. They’re like now we don’t have a father, I’m the man of the family now. But there’s the mother, you’re still a kid. This is why we wanted to make this film because we want to shed light on those small stories and also to the young generation that’s coming up. If you’re living with your mother without your father; respect her, accept her and listen to her, don’t judge her. She’s doing everything in her power to make you a great kid.

CL: I loved that she names her pies ‘Kinan Snack’, such a small detail that adds so much

MS: Because she’s doing everything for her family. She’s not doing it for herself. Never. She was never selfish. She’s doing it for him to work, to be responsible and to actually in a way to make him stay in the country and to see that they can do something, even though, we never know, he might leave the country eventually.

CL: He works as such a good foil to Arze, and Hamwi is excellent. Was this his first acting role?

MS: He wasn’t an unprofessional actor. He had very small roles in a TV series before that. He was not 18. He actually turned 18 on set. So it was very interesting to find someone just like Kenan, who was turning 18 in the movie, and Bilal was turning 18. I just saw an audition tape. And I was like, okay, bring him in, then when he entered the room…just the way he moves the way, the way he speaks without even acting, like…”Damn, that’s what is going on”. He is someone who is spontaneous, someone who is angry at life in a way. I saw it even before actually auditioning him. I love talking to the actors when they come in the room before they take the script and read me this part. So I’m talking to him and it felt like this is a person who’s living what Kinan is living. Bilal is someone who wants to leave the country. And he’s Syrian, he’s not Lebanese, so to master the accent was brilliant as well. So everything is like, he’s living with his parents, he was suffocated. He’s a refugee in Lebanon, he was planning on leaving after the movie. So it was like all in all, it was perfect. He rides the scooter, he grew up playing football on the streets. He knew the streets really well. He’s a kid who wants to make it happen and make it happen fast. And the world is very excited. And he’s very spontaneous. And the way he moved, the way he talked, everything was like a ‘click’.

CL: It’d be nice to have the energy of an 18-year-old again. I can only imagine what I would get done if I had the energy I had when I was 18. On casting, can we talk about your titular character? Diamand Abou Abboud was extraordinary. What was the process in getting her on board?

MS: Diamand is one of the most important actors in the MENA region. She’s someone who I’ve seen a lot and loved watching on screen. To be honest with you, we reached out but it was just like “okay, let’s try our luck”. I’m a first-time feature director, this is the guy’s first-time script being directed and produced. I didn’t know if she was going to love the movie, but I thought we should try our luck and we reached out. Then I remember she sent an email and said the script is really nice. Can we have a call? I thought maybe she’s going to come to us like “I have this comment, this comment, I don’t think this works, I want to change this, I want to change that”, or ask for a huge budget, which we didn’t have. I remember, we opened the Zoom call and then it was me, Diamand, Sam and Louay [Khraish, scriptwriter] and the second she opened the call, she started talking about the script, and she started crying about it. Then I looked at the screen, and I saw that Sam and I were crying as well. I thought, “That’s it! we got her!” Talking to her, she just gets the character. She put her trust in me, which I totally appreciate. I learned a lot from her. When I work again, with different actors, I know that I will get to use a lot of techniques that she taught me on set because she’s a great actress and teacher as well. She teaches actors in Lebanon, so she’s someone who lived and experienced Lebanon. She’s someone who knows the streets a lot. She’s someone who grew up in a family who would bake spinach pies all the time. It was her recipe [used in the film], and she insisted on doing this because she’s like, “I have my own recipe for that”, as she used to watch her mom when she was young. She is someone who is very picky about scripts. It was her first role where she was a lead actress, so for her to accept that this was going to be the film where she was lead actress was an honour. It was an honour to work with her and I can’t wait to work with her again. The casting was the same with the sister, Layla [Betty Taoutel]. We reached out before even having the budget or anything. We were in Cairo, and the producers were talking to her, and we’re watching her, and then we’re like, “Damn! She could definitely be Layla easily”. She’s the type of actress that hasn’t been working in TV or film for so long – as she was teaching – but I grew up seeing her on TV. She’s a pioneer in film, TV and theatre in Lebanon. And she’s the type of actress who can do anything, honestly. You can give her any role, and she would do it perfectly. She was listening, trusting the process. All give and take, it was like a very collaborative work with all of us.

CL: You speak about collaborating, and when Diamand taught you on set. But as director, how do you direct someone like her to help give such an emotional performance?

MS: One of the things I love about making films since I started learning everything about movies is directing actors. It’s something that even in my MFA, in my independent study, it was something I worked on. I did a lot of workshops about directing actors. I read a lot of books and I learned that the one thing you need to do is make the actor trust you. Even if I’m a young director, she needs to trust my vision. And that’s what both of them, Betty and Diamand did. So that’s how the work was so smooth and easy. That’s why I call it a collaboration, because I learned from her because she’s a teacher, and she’s someone who puts her trust in me. When I tell her, for example, something is not working or I think we need to switch the tone. She would ask “why do you think this?” and we would talk, and it was a conversation. It was very smooth. She was listening all the time. She was accepting the comments. And it wasn’t a challenge. And that’s why I think, honestly, I was able to get out everything I wanted from her. I might eventually work with an actress who doesn’t listen to me. Even if I became the best director, you never know, some actors don’t, it happens. But always build trust with your actors. Let them believe in your vision because they need to trust that you’re not going to let them go on screen in a bad performance because this is going to affect them and affect me as well. That was the main goal for me.

CL: Beirut is sectarian. Did you hit any snags in the production process because of this? Did you have to pull your own Arze in some way?

MS: Oh, yeah. Oh my God. That and LILACS by the way! I’m going to tell you a story: when me, the producer ,and the writer were going around Lebanon in April, we were going to the Shia area. And I remember, when I pulled up, we were going into this barber shop. My name is Shaib, so I was like…do we say where we’re from? We did the same thing in the Christian area. I remember in LILACS, for example, we were filming in a Shia neighbourhood, where the butcher is, and this area is very sectarian. Most of the men on the crew were wearing the Shia sword. So when we were talking to the men in the area, they would be like “Oh, where are you from? Let’s talk,” and it made it easier. So we put that in both films. Yeah, we changed our identities several times. Not because they were going to reject us, to be honest, it was more because we didn’t want the give and take. One time, I was just parking my car in one of the areas, and I was asked “You’re not from this neighbourhood, where are you from?”. I was, like, “Yeah, I’m not from the area, but I’m just parking my car”. So this is something that is very common and I was assured that this is something that is common. After the first day – at the first premiere – the Lebanese went out of the theatre and were saying “Oh my God, this happened to me…by the way this happened to me”. So it’s something that has happened to many of us, and sometimes we have to pretend, just so we get what we want. So we didn’t create that, that was something that we live every day in Lebanon.

CL: Vittorio De Sica’s BICYCLE THIEVES is obviously a big influence on the film. What other films do you see as influences on ARZE as well?

MS: Definitely the Dardenne brothers. TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT, definitely. The way they showed Paris or France. You know, like, I love the realism they put in their movies. I love how, you know, you have an idea about the beauty of France, the beauty of Paris, and then they come in and they’re not going to film next to the Eiffel Tower because that’s not from Paris. Paris is also suburbs. And in Paris there are also some streets that are not as beautiful.

CL: It was a bit of a culture shock when I went, expecting the Paris glamour and was surprised to find it that way

MS: Exactly and they did that. When I was doing my Bachelor’s, they were my top inspiration for movies. And I always said that I want to put women in situations that are cruel, and in a misogynistic society and I then want them to get what they want. Then TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT comes out and they put one of the most gorgeous actresses, Marion Cotillard, in the worst situation ever. And she pulls off one of the best performances. You just want her to get her job back, you know, as she goes around and as she gets shut down, you see the streets. And for a second, I’m like, where are they filming? Is that in Lebanon? Because it doesn’t show it like it’s France. So I definitely go back to the Dardenne brothers when I talk about my style.

CL: If you haven’t seen it, I think you’d really enjoy a French film called FULL TIME, which is about a woman trying to balance her job with childcare and train strikes, and it kind of follows that pattern. I think you’d enjoy it.

MS: Okay, great. Yeah, I’ll definitely watch it. Such stories inspire me a lot. And I love when they place their characters in the most cruel situation, and for them to figure it out. I’m hugely inspired by Italian realism. So that’s why BICYCLE THIEVES was one of the movies that inspired it. And I’m also a huge lover of Pedro Almovadar and the vibrant colours. That’s what I tried to include when it comes to ARZE, because Beirut is not grey and Beirut is not yellow. Beirut is vibrant. Beirut has graffiti all around. Beirut is colourful, it is green and blue. They do this like a mix of colours. That’s where that inspiration of colours in ARZE come from. It’s Pedro. And of course the movie CARAMEL by Nadine Labaki, which I think pushed me into film because I watched it when I was really young. I was in the cinema, and I didn’t understand anything. Then, when I watched it again, after some time, I felt this is how you want to show Beirut. And this is the reality of women’s lives. The first time you see them on screen in the Arab world. Because you don’t see gay characters, you don’t see women being afraid of her period, you don’t see such characters. So she [Labaki] came in, and it was her first feature, and she put in those four characters to show the reality of women and what that was like.

“Always listen, because you’re working with professionals, and that it’s a collaboration. I never want people to come to my movies and consider it a job. I want them to consider it as their baby as well. It’s a movie for everyone on set.”

CL: What lessons have you taken from this experience of your first feature film?

MS: Have more days to film. I mean, we shot 21 locations in 23 days. That’s crazy. And you saw the movie, it has a lot of locations that we’re jumping back and forth. Also don’t film in August, not in the heat. Never settle. There’s something that I like when I read reviews. Sometimes I’m scared because, you know, when the review comes out, I’m like, “Oh my God, are they gonna trash me?” And you know, this is forever. Phones are forever. That’s it, what you saw is forever, and I’m not going to be able to change anything about it. I’m always going to see stuff that I wish I did in a different way. So for me, and for any young director, first features will always have mistakes because that’s normal. That’s a learning experience. But never settle, not when it comes to casting, when it comes to locations, when it comes to anything. I’m glad that I was patient for almost eight years. The patience gave me this movie. So yeah, for my next movie, I learned to trust what I want. Always listen, because you’re working with professionals, and that it’s a collaboration. I never want people to come to my movies and consider it a job. I want them to consider it as their baby as well. It’s a movie for everyone on set.

CL: On a similar note, do you have any advice for young filmmakers, or specifically Lebanese filmmakers who want to follow in your footsteps?

MS: Be patient. Don’t give up. I know it’s tough. I had to leave my country. I had to work on a lot of things that I didn’t want to work on, things that I wasn’t passionate about, but trust in yourself. And don’t give up on your ideas. Even if it takes too long, you’re going be able to do it eventually. But push yourself to trust in yourself. And then once you do that, it will show to others. It will show that this person is able to do this movie. Because…I know the situation in Lebanon is horrible. I know we don’t have funds. I’ve struggled as well, but I’m thankful that I had a great team who always said to be patient, that we’re going to do it – and we did it eventually, so patience is key.