A Lebanese young girl is struggling for independence in Leila Basma’s coming-of-age short film Sea Salt, presented in the Orizzonti strand of the 80th Venice Film Festival.
Another Venezia 80 entry, another coming-of-age movie. This time we discovered the story of the lost adolescence of a young Arab girl in Sea Salt directed by Leila Basma, premiering as a part of Orizzonti Short competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival. A visually arresting, well-made movie, despite its over-familiar set-ups, Basma’s film, which is based on her experiences growing up between two extremes of free-spirited people and conservative society in Lebanon, is still an attention-grabber among this year’s lineup.
Sea Salt follows a 17-year-old girl, bar waitress Nayla who will turn 18 in three months and realizes that she doesn’t want to live more in her small town on the southern seaside in Lebanon, that’s why she secretly makes a decision to go away with her new mischievous boyfriend and hopes to join University and to discover Beirut. On the other hand, her brother is planning to take her to Canada with him because “We don’t allow girls to live alone” in a big city full of parties and abuses– as he references the Lebanese capital. Faced with the same dilemma every Lebanese youngster is faced with today, Nayla has to make a life decision to know who she wants to be.
The film is filled with a social commentary that could only have come from experiences and memory. At this point, the director tries to bring the kind of small details between the at-times cruel world of living in the Middle East in terms of morality (such as the dress codes for women), poverty, dysfunctional family, and the main character’s pursuit of youth and freedom to her 19-minute film that makes this short story a captivating and complex coming-of-age story. The result is mesmerizing, even more beautiful with Zaher Jureidini’s careful 16mm photography, bright and lovely at the beginning but it turns sharp and cold at the end following the character’s navigation into freedom itself, just like the salt in the sea that is good for stopping the bleeding, which is a foundation between the director and her story.
Mainly a Czech production (Natália Pavlove for other stories), the film was also produced by Lebanese outfit Road2Films (Cynthia Choucair) and Prague-based Stairway Films (Petr Oplatka, Vašek Sládek). Sea Salt is the graduation film of Basma from The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) and now is developing her first feature-length documentary Dance with Me. LightsOn holds its world sales. The Italian sales outlet previously boarded Orizzonti Short films Techno, Mama in 2021 and Tria – del sentiment del tradie in 2022. The outlet also handles this year’s Orizzonti Short entry Cross My Heart and Hope to Die and Group Picture which world premiered in the Critics’ Week section.
