What would a film look like if it were made without special effects, without "action", without "professional" actors pretending to be what they are not, without superheroes but with real people?
"Yara" invites us to participate in the daily life of the eponymous young girl, who lives with her grandmother in the Lebanese mountains. A tender summer love story, a triumphant celebration of youth and innocence, Yara makes us believe in the possibility of beauty and love.
In this new film by the French-Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel, we are faced with a radically simple approach, a story devoid of ornaments, built with the minimum necessary resources, where shines, for example, the austerity of the place and a narration based on very few camera movements, using medium and general shots to always keep the body of nature present.
This is a movie about two pristine/virgin beauties - the girls and the valley. Both have only visitors, no inhabitants.
I will stand in my belief that Yara is a horrible film, even if it is kind of funny. This was the third film I saw at AFI Festival this past Wednesday, and man, was I annoyed, bored, and disappointed.
Filmed in the almost unbearably beautiful mountains of Lebanon, "Yara" is one of the most beguiling films you will see in a month of Sundays, setting out a way of life that might seem as remote as the place where director Abbas Fahdel chose to film it. Yara herself is a young girl who lives in the mountains with her aged grandmother.
Yara is a rare film in the way that it is not encumbered with a classic narrative.
