mec film

A gem that features one of the festival’s (Hot Docs) most appealing characters, The One Man Village is a superb document of war’s impact on a changing countryside. (NOW Magazine, Suzan G.Cole)

Simon El Habre certainly emerges as a talent to watch, and his gift for composition and mood indicates he could be equally comfortable in the fiction arena with his next. (Screen Daily, Fionnuala Halligan)

[…] Though coming up with countless magical images, Lebanese documentary „The One Man Village“ is not a fiction film. Director Simon El Habre is visiting his uncle Semaan in the village of Ain El-Halazoun, where he is living alone with cats, chicken and cows for the last five years. The Lebanese civil war has depopulated this area in 1982, and the wonderful film shows in a touching way how a man seeks refuge in an idyll in order to hide the deep scars. A film full of poetry and simple worldly wisdom. (Berliner Morgenpost, Eberhart von Elterlien)

Semaan bey, his animals, his visitors, and the land itself speak to us of otherwise unspeakable hardship, grief, and the possibility of beauty and peace in our world. […]Simon El Habre shows us a man living in beauty, in peace with his former enemies. We have a chance, if we listen to stories like this one. (Groundreport, Avery Hudson)

„The One Man Village“ is the haunting portrait of a complex, forgotten landscape, frequented mainly by the older generation as a phantom-place occupied with souvenirs of their memory. […]
Reaching far beyond the own, familial access and horizon Simon El Habre succeeds in “The One Man Village” to show the landscape as space of memory. With reluctant distance he tries – as still-life and in well-directed and yet casual conversations – not only to understand his uncle but also the psycho-social facets of those who preferred not to return to the village. (taz, Bettina Allamoda)

Thrilling, painful, mature and very well done. It announces the birth of real cinematographer, who combines courage and talent. A film that has no place for hatred. (Al-Akhbar, Pierre Abi Saab (review for World Premiere in October 2008)

A film that goes under the skin. (Al-Mustaqbal, Reema Mismar)

It looks like, this film is the major cinematographic event of the year 2008 in Beirut accomplished with courage sensitivity and professionalism (the dramatic construction, the editing, the cinematography...)The young director shows us reality with a sincere and transparent vision. He depicts the story that is partly a personal experience. […] He does not compromise for the sake of marketing and mass audience. The artist is a witness, a citizen present in the centre of his work.
(Al-Akhbar, Pierre Abi Saab (in an article about Lebanese film year 2008, January 2009)

Each story in the film provides a glimpse of the history of Lebanon and the situation of a country half-way between forgetting and remembering. A film in which horror and beauty, pain and poetry are side by side. An unobtrusive reflection on origins, ties forged with places and people, the consequences of war and the attempt to accept painful memories as part of one’s life. (Berlinale, Forum Booklet)

Besides the comforting forgivingness and humanity, that this film illustrates despite the omnipresence of the war in the memory of Lebanese society, I have to mention its photographic expressiveness: One could have watched it also mute and with still images – tough one would miss Semaan’s unbeatable humor – but would still understand what this, by the way very sympathetic, documentary filmmaker wanted to tell the audience. (Minerva.jimdo.com, Frauke M)