Costa Brava, Lebanon

Mounia Akl's first feature follows a family who leave the pollution and the rubbish crisis of Beirut for a house in the mountains. They generate their own electricity, grow their own food and have cut their ties with the city. Then a landfill begins going up right at the edge of their land. Nadine Labaki and Saleh Bakri play the parents. What the film finds best is the crack inside the escape: the family may look as though it decided together, but the older daughter wants to return to the city, the grandmother remembers a different past, and the father treats retreat as defeat. The landfill does not import this tension, it makes visible what was already there. The film refers directly to Lebanon's 2015 waste crisis without shifting into documentary language. On screen there is mountain, dust and a pile that keeps rising. It screened in the Horizons section at Venice. Who it's for: viewers who like political questions told from inside a family. Who it's not for: viewers wanting an explanation of the crisis in Lebanon; the film assumes you know the context.