From NPR:
1982 isn’t your typical war film.
It’s a love story set during growing tensions in the Middle East, when Israel invaded Lebanon 40 years ago. Lebanese filmmaker Oualid Mouaness, inspired by his own memories, wrote the script and directed the film.
He was 10 years old, attending an idyllic school in the Beirut suburbs, when the war changed life as he knew it. “I do remember everything being so beautiful and everything sort of changing,” Mouaness tells Morning Edition.
“I remember that afternoon when the dogfights were going on in the sky. That’s when my brother who was younger than me just completely lost it and started yelling at us to go inside because he thought the airplanes were going to fall on us,” he says. The invasion happened against the backdrop of a city divided, between a mostly Muslim West Beirut and a predominately Christian East Beirut. Mouaness bases 1982 at a school much like the one he attended. The film is set in the mountains of Lebanon and the school is picturesque. It’s religiously mixed, the kids switch seamlessly from Arabic to English to French and they’re not yet indoctrinated into the adult world of religious and ideological divides.
More here.