Skies of Lebanon

Chloé Mazlo's 2021 debut feature draws on her own family history. In the 1950s Alice leaves the Swiss mountains for Beirut and falls in love with Joseph, an eccentric astrophysicist determined to put the first Lebanese national into space; after years of happiness the civil war cuts everything off. The film renders the war not realistically but through handmade sets, stop motion and theatrical devices. That formal choice is open to argument: telling the destruction of war in a fairy-tale register produces distance and delicacy for some viewers and softens the pain for others. Mazlo's background in animation explains where the choice comes from. Alba Rohrwacher's Alice convincingly carries the position of a migrant who cannot leave her adopted country. Who it's for: viewers who like personal accounts of the Lebanese civil war and formally experimental films. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a realistic depiction of war, or who will find the handmade aesthetic mismatched to the subject.