At the beginning of the film we are told that we will be watching an illusionary Beirut. It turns out that between the production’s conception and shooting starting, Israel was bombing Beirut and southern Lebanon to such a degree that filming in-country became impossible.
Instead of simply moving production elsewhere and choosing locations that could pass for the Lebanese capital, and spurred on by a desire to capture the vignettes of a city that they feared could disappear, Director Danielle Arbid decided to have rear projection constantly running in the background, having had cinematographers capture the locales in Beirut where the film’s scenes were originally meant to be shot, while the action scenes were filmed in Paris.
The effect is somewhat dreamlike; reminiscent of older films where the use of rear projection was common particularly for outdoor scenes, while also seeming fresh and contemporarily raw, dealing as it is in real- time with tumlutous world events, and somehow more honest.
As Arbid said, “It’s a film that had to resist in order to exist.”
Premiered at Berlinale 2026
In Panorama
Directed by: Danielle Arbid
Screenplay by: Danielle Arbid
Director of Photography: Céline Bozon
Edited by: Clément Pinteaux
Produced by: Nadia Turincev, Omar El Kadi and Georges Schoucair
Co- Produced by: Amanda Turnbull and Ziad Srouji
Original Music by: Bachar Mar Khalifé
Starring: Hiam Abbass, Amine Benrachid, Cynthia El Khazen, Shaden Fakih, Charbel Kamel, Alexandre Paulikevitch.
Only Rebels Win is a love story wrapped up in a political commentary and layered with a dissection of Lebanese society. Suzanne, played by the wonderful Hiam Abbass, meets Osmane played by the French actor Amine Benrachid in his first lead role in a feature film, after saving him from a racist attack. Both are outsiders in Beirut; Osmane is Sudanese, young, undocumented and working out how to improve his life’s circumstances. Suzanne is more integrated and employed, being a middle-class widow who was married to a Lebanese man, but with somewhat buried Palestinian roots, and adult children who rely on, and monitor, their mother’s activities.
Against the odds the couple fall in love, their romance blossoming into a tender portrait of domesticity and connection, juxtaposed against the screams and howls of family, neighbours, colleagues, clergy, and all the authorities, which find the passion and the time to police a realtionship while their own lives and the city around them descend into deeping chaos.
We watch the personal drive the political, as not only Suzanne’s sexuality is re-awakened, but also her rebellious streak, her sense of outrage and protest that she long ago learned to temper with tradition.
Abbass, known to a new generation of audiences for her turn in the TV mega- hit Succession, is a Palestinian actress and filmmaker herself, born in Nazareth, starting her acting career in the Palestinian El-Hakawati Theater in East Jerusalem in the 80s. The Director and Abbas go back a way, Abbas having been the first actress Arbid chose for her first short film, Raddem in 1998.
When asked about whether the role of Suzanne was created with Abbas always in mind, Arbid said, “Her talent, her beauty, and above all her freedom in the choices she makes are rare and precious in the film industry. Working with Hiam is pure pleasure. She is an ideal partner. Our love and the faith we have in each other guide our decisions. Everything flows smoothly; I make suggestions, she makes suggestions, and in the end it doesn’t matter. We understand each other. A filmmaker needs to be loved in order to create an entire world, and to be able to make it beautiful. And with Hiam, I have never doubted that love.”
Danielle Arbid is a French filmmaker and video artist of Lebanese origin. Her fiction films – In the Battlefields, A Lost Man, Parisienne, and Simple Passion – were selected and received awards at Cannes (Official Selection and Directors’ Fortnight), as well as at San Sebastián, Toronto, Busan, and Locarno among other international festivals. Simple Passion, adapted from the autobiographical novella, by Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux, was an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival in 2020 and went on to play the Toronto, San Sebastián, Busan, Zurich and Sydney Film Festivals. Her documentaries and film essays have won Locarno’s Golden and Silver Leopard as well as the Prix Albert Londres.
Her idea for the film was born in the reality of the current political climate and her deep sense of what is happening in Lebanon.
Arbid said, “The world itself is becoming more radicalized every day, and I believe that cinema, like all art, is political. I feel this is a film that resonates with our particularly troubling times… in the Middle East and now all through the West as well. I am someone who lives on the edge of both worlds. So perhaps that’s why I can feel so acutely how freedom has become a daily battle for us all. It’s a global issue and struggle… I think all of my films, documentaries or fiction…or even my video works are each marked in some way by a sense of rebellion and scandal. I think the question of confrontation with the established order is one I never stop working on.”
The couple do find allies and supporters, either those who already live on the edge of society and outside prescribed norms, or those who whisper to them that they think the love story is beautiful, even though to support the couple more openly would incur a price they are not willing to pay. The resistance of love and community and goodwill is challenged inside a political landscape that rewards judgement and negativity and aggression.
The film is middle finger to systems that stand in the way of freedom and love, and the parting shot is a clever twist on what is real and what is not, and what needs to be transcended for individuals and societies to move forward.
As Arbid said, “It was a unique and ambitious approach to making a film – and a country that was impossible to film in at the time – exist.”
