Ok, Enough, Goodbye

Colour, HD CAM
Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, 2010, 95 min
IP - International Premiere
Section: Forum of Independents

About the film

The Lebanese city of Tripoli may be an attractive tourist destination but if you live in one of its suburban prefab complexes it’s nothing to get excited about. Especially if you share a small ground-floor flat with your meticulous elderly mother. The protagonist, a 40-something man who runs a small sweet shop, has had just about enough of endless conversations, card parties, and boring get-togethers with his mother’s friends. But when his mother leaves for Beirut one day without even telling him, he feels overwhelmed and deceived. He suddenly finds that he’s not ready to live alone, realizing that his newfound independence is far from what he had imagined. The only source of amusement to break up his monotonous existence is a neighborhood urchin.... In its own small way, this documentary-style tragicomedy by a duo of debuting filmmakers touches on the global topic of broken family ties and the loneliness suffered in our outwardly "user-friendly” modern society.

About the director

Rania Attieh (b. 1978, Tripoli, Lebanon) graduated in screenwriting and direction from City College of New York. Her graduation work received a school award for best dramatic film. Daniel Garcia (b. 1979) hails from South Texas and graduated from New York University. In 2007 he gained attention with his school film Nothing Nowhere, which he shot in Morocco. Attieh and Garcia have written and directed several shorts which have screened at such festivals as Avignon, Woodstock, and Munich. Their most successful shorts are From the Parapet (2005), Almost Brooklyn (2008), made under the supervision of acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and Tripoli, Quiet (2009 – awarded at Abu Dhabi). The directors live in New York. OK, Enough, Goodbye is their feature debut.