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Adel Karam (right) plays Tony in THE INSULT
[/fusion_text][fusion_text]One of the most unforgettable Miami Film Society special events of the past several years was our June 4, 2013 screening of Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack, with a poignant Skype q&a with the director after the screening. The Attack went on to play at MDC’s Tower Theater Miami for 6 consecutive weeks and became one of the theater’s top 5 box office hits of 2013.
Now, Doueiri is back with a new film, The Insult, and Miami Film Society members will again get a one-night-only exclusive advance screening before the film returns to Tower Theater Miami next February. After a high profile world premiere and Best Actor win (for Kamel El Basha, who plays Yasser in the film) at Venice Film Festival, Lebanon selected The Insult as its submission to the 90th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.[/fusion_text][fusion_text]
Kamel El Basha (second from left) won Best Actor at Venice for his performance as Yasser in THE INSULT
[/fusion_text][fusion_text]In these days of re-heightened tensions between fractious peoples, The Insult takes off from an incident that is unfortunately nearly as commonplace as it is ugly. A hot afternoon in Beirut, and a Palestinian naturalized construction foreman, Yasser, is trying to speed up a project that is falling behind while keeping everything up to code. When Yasser notices an apartment dweller, a Christian business owner named Tony (Adel Karam), has an illegal drainpipe, he replaces it with a proper one – which Tony promptly smashes. Tempers flare, and the escalating argument results in Yasser delivering the titular verbal insult – a natural response to Tony’s insulting actions.
Just as one bullet started World War I, Yasser’s insult, and Tony’s refusal to allow the man to apologize, triggers a national sensation and a riveting courtroom drama that exposes the deep divisions at crisis in Lebanon today. Doueiri’s sobering drama treats each man’s indignity with compassion and respect, and gives us a thematic, incisive warning about where hard-line, entrenched positions, not just in Lebanon but from anywhere in the world, could take us.
Join the Miami Film Society today – and join this, and many other conversations. miff2020.wpengine.com/membership[/fusion_text][fusion_text]
THE INSULT directed by Ziad Doueiri
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