Winners
Winner 2009
Éliane Raheb
Eliane Raheb, a 37 year-old filmmaker from Lebanon, received the $10,000 award for her project “The Confession”
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Assaad Shaftari is a Lebanese Christian. In 1973, aged 18, he felt a threat to his Christian identity when he saw “his inferior brothers”, the Muslims, were gaining political power. To defend “the Christian cause”, he joined a major Christian “the Phalanges”, where he became highly involved in the civil war through developing the intelligence system of the armed branch of the militia named “Lebanese forces”.
After the war, in 1990, Lebanon pardoned all war crimes in the Amnesty Law, but Assaad felt a terrible culpability and admitted being responsible for kidnapping and killing hundreds of people. “The Confession” will give him the space to confess his acts and confront himself and his victims. The film will try to analyse the reasons behind fanatic attitudes that create potential war monsters and will provoke the involved people to take responsibility.
The grant from the Alter-Ciné Foundation helped to develop my film. When we made our application, the film was in its early stages and it was very difficult to convince international funding bodies that such a complex project could actually succeed. The grant supported our research phase (one and a half years) and allowed us to write a convincing script and shoot the pilot introducing our characters, all of which served to convince other funding agencies to support this ambitious documentary.
I would like to thank the Alter-Ciné Foundation for having believed in this project, and I hope other filmmakers with ambitious documentary projects will also benefit from your support.
– Éliane Raheb