In 2015 Ely Dagher was awarded the Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Short for his film Waves ’98, which KVIFF presented that year as part of its special focus “A Week of Lebanese Cinema”. This year he returned to the world’s leading film festival, specifically to the section Directors’ Fortnight, with his feature debut, a compelling, darkly dreamlike portrait of his native Beirut. Jana, a woman shrouded in mysterious melancholy (Manal Issa, who also appears in Memory Box, programmed at KVIFF this year), travels back home from her years spent in Paris, perhaps to re-establish contact with the past, and perhaps to try to understand what caused the transformation of the magical Lebanese metropolis into a city of ghosts lapped by the waves of a fragile, elusive sea.