The Simmering East

by Jacques Debs

Lebanon, France

Director: Jacques Debs

Script: Jacques Debs

Cinematographer: M.A. Batigne

Editor: C. Benoit

Music: Vincent Epplay, Arvo Pärt, Fayrouz

Production: A.D.R Productions
2 rue de la roquette
75011 Paris
France
Tel: 0033 1.43.14.34.37
Fax: 0033 1.43.14.34.30

Year: 1999

Betacam digital, Colour, 59 min
OV with French Subtitles

Unreleased

Lebanon, Jacques Debs ‘s country, has been facing war for twenty-five years. People in the Near East have kept tearing each other apart for a century. Haunted by fear, the director goes searching for another Orient, the one nobody ever speaks about, the hidden and intimate one, the Orient that simmers in the kitchen pots and dissolves in the labyrinth of identities... One man and five women tell us about their understanding of the relationship between the Orient, cooking and hospitality. Cooking can be a ground for alienation, a restriction of freedom, but it can also be a source of pleasure and happiness and can reveal the joy of sharing. This film makes us travel in four countries from the Near East, all in war: Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine. It is a pilgrimage, at the search for lost happiness...