The Lebanese-French director Danielle Arbid opens the Panorama section of the 76th Berlinale with Only Rebels Win and steps back onto a major festival stage after Cannes’ Official Selection in 2020 with Simple Passion [+leggi anche:
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The opening images of Beirut unfold to a voice-over stating that the city in the film is an illusion due to current Israeli bombings, accompanied by the song “El Hilwatu” by Mar-Khalife, a Lebanese-born, Paris-based musician who merges Arabic heritage, Western classical, electronic tapestry and ritualistic texture - a music shaped by exile, memory and political fracture. “El Hilwatu”, the beautiful one, could be a lover, the homeland, a lost ideal, or even a memory. This balance, shifting between distance and closeness, illusion and reality, shapes the film’s architecture.

Hiam Abbass, in the lead role, shares a political and artistic history with Arbid. She plays Suzanne, a middle-class widow of Palestinian origin and mother of two grown-ups, who saves young Sudanese migrant Osman (Amine Benrachid) from a racist street attack. What begins as a budding friendship, marked by empathy and an unexpected depth of understanding between two lonely, connection-starved souls, evolves into a love story. While Hélène in Simple Passion is overwhelmed by a desire that damages her life, in Only Rebels Win desire is reclaimed - not as self-destruction, but as an act of resistance against social hierarchies.

The forty-year age gap creates a radical premise within Suzanne’s social environment, and the love story remains deliberately melodramatic, echoing Douglas Sirk. As soon as the unexpected love affair becomes public, they face an inevitable backlash shaped by ageism, racism and class hierarchy, ranging from open hostility to isolation. Everything around them signals: stay in your place.

Where Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul relied on the apparent solidity of its spaces to expose social fracture, Only Rebels Win begins by dismantling that certainty. As the entire film is shot using rear-projection footage of Beirut, the actors never inhabit real spaces; instead, they perform before a projected reality — a formal analogy for displaced bodies and mediated memory. Director of photography Céline Bozon masters this unique process with precision, ensuring that the projected city retains both texture and presence. At the same time, the characters feel drawn with a minimal brush, and the viewer is invited to complete the rest. Social structures function in much the same way.

With Osmane, Suzanne experiences a form of attention she has never fully known: being seen beyond the usual roles of a housewife and mother. He loves her as a woman, and she loves him not only for his youth but for the feeling of truly being seen. When he introduces her to his milieu of marginalised outcasts and artists of all origins, ages and relationship models, she encounters unconditional acceptance and support. Here, the film reveals the beauty of openness and tolerance, presenting love as both a guiding force in life and a risk taken in pursuit of bliss - which raises the question of why so many people avoid it, resist it and, at the same time, long for it.

Only Rebels Win was produced by Easy Riders Films (France), Abbout Productions (Lebanon) and Rise Studiso (United Arab Emirates). Italy’s Fandango Sales handles international rights.