Danielle Arbid

Career

Her documentaries and other filmed essays have been given an excellent reception and won dozens of awards including the Gold Leopard for Conversations de salon at the Locarno Festival and the Silver Leopard for video for Seule avec la guerre in 2001 and 2004 respectively, as well as the Prix Albert Londres and the Villa Médicis hors les murs Award for Aux Frontières.

Her third fiction feature, Peur de rien (Parisienne), had its theatrical release in France on February 10, 2016. It won the Académie Lumière foreign press prize as well as other awards including the Best Actress prize at Les Arcs. The film had rave reviews from the French press. Peur de rien had its world première at the Toronto Film Festival.

Several retrospectives have been held around Danielle Arbid's films at the Bastia Festival in 2007, Paris cinéma in 2007, the Gijon Festival in 2007 and the La Rochelle Festival in 2008, Festival de popoli Florence (2016).

Arbid left Lebanon at the height of the civil war in 1987, at the age of 17, to study literature at a faculty of letters in Paris, France. She also studied journalism while working as a freelance French Journalist for five years, including writing Libération dailies. In 1997 her interests in journalism lead to a career in filmmaking when she directed her first short Raddem and the documentary Seule ave la guerre (1999). Having never studied film in school, Arbid says her inspiration comes from "art, photography, people in the street and of course film". Her first three Conversation de Salon I-III where featured at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and received the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Interested in different narrative forms, her work alternates between; fiction, first person documentaries and video essays; with an experimentation of the intersecting of genres. She was one of the founding members of the Lebanese film festival Né à Beyrouth in 2001. Danielle Arbid directed "Beirut Hotel", TV-movie for ARTE aired during prime time. One of the channel’s most popular fiction broadcasts in 2012.

In this interview given during the festival de Popoli in 2016, she said : "I want to be as close to my fictional characters as I am to those of my documentaries. I want to live parallel lives, not just tell stories; feel strong states of mind and sensations. My feature films, the way I perceive them, are like documentaries on my characters. I use a lot close-ups and long focus shoots to penetrate the universe that I create and purloin moments from it, forgetting the reality of the shooting as much as possible. I have frequently filmed sex. I believe this is a prerogative of mine, as woman and as person of Arab origin. With the portrayal of bodies, and the grace that emanates from them, I try to get close to painting. I am always trying to embellish, exalt the actors. Of course, the show business is always part of making a film, but the most extraordinary thing about cinema is the risk component. You never know the result you’ll get in the end. Coming from a family of gamblers – my father was a poker player – I adore this aspect. When I make a film, I don’t take anything for granted. Shooting sex scenes is even more risky, even in Europe, in some ways. On the other hand, in my culture of origin, the Lebanese, where almost all of my films are forbidden, it’s even worse. Nonetheless, I yearn incessantly for every film to be as burning as possible, in both substance and form as well as in the manner it is realized."

Danielle Arbid has finished the post production of her third feature film "Peur de Rien" English title Parisienne / 2015 produced by Les Films Pelléas. The films was premiered at the Toronto film festival and received Le prix de l'Académie Lumière. She’s currently working on her fourth feature, Passion Simple an adaptation of the major French writer Annie Ernaux’s best seller book. Danielle Arbid is also a photographer.

Awards