EXCLUSIVE: Palestinian-French Succession star Hiam Abbass hits the Berlin Film Festival this week in Danielle Arbid’s Beirut-set drama Only Rebels Win, playing a lonely Palestinian widow who falls in love with a young Sudanese man.
Deadline can reveal the first trailer for the radical love story revolving around Suzanne and undocumented migrant Osmane, whose relationship provokes a wave of anger and indignation all around them, forcing them to resist.
Amine Benrachid, a French actor with South Sudanese and Chadian roots, co-stars in his first major big screen role as Osmane. Benrachid trained at the free, alternative nonprofit film school École Kourtrajmé founded by Les Misérables director Ladj Ly.
Only Rebels Win is the six feature from Lebanon-born director Arbid, who relocated to Paris as student at the height of the civil war in 1987, after In the Battlefields (2004), A Lost Man (2007), Parisienne (2015), and Simple Passion (2020).
She says her new work, which opens the Berlinale’s Panorama section, is a reflection of today’s politically turbulent world.
“This is a film that resonates with our particularly troubling times… in the Middle East and now all through the West as well. I am someone who lives on the edge of both worlds. So perhaps that’s why I can feel so acutely how freedom has become a daily battle for us all. It’s a global issue and struggle,” she says in a director’s note.
“Trapped by conventions that do not suit them, this modest and courageous woman and this vulnerable man are fighting against an entire society. Their love itself is a defiant gesture, a middle finger even. But everything has its price.”
The feature is produced by Nadia Turincev at Paris-based Easy Riders Films and Omar El Kadi and Georges Schoucair at Paris-based Abbout Productions in coproduction with Arab Radio and Television Network and Rise Studios, in association with Les Films Pelléas, Reborn Studio, and Arte Kino Productions 22.
The film is sold internationally by Rome-based Fandango Sales.
English (US) ·