Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

GazerRise Fantastic!

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

robinakaaly This was a very engrossing film about the immediate aftermath of the war in South Lebanon in 2006. The film starts with graphic footage of Israeli bombing of Lebanese towns and refugee camps: modern weaponry is not for the faint hearted. A well dressed woman (with interesting décolletage) arrives in Beirut. She is looking for her son and her sister who live in the south. She negotiates with a taxi driver to take her there. At first they spark off each other, not least as she is reticent about her background. The drive south through bomb damaged towns, villages, roads and bridges was quite chilling (as is essentially the whole film). In her home town, which has been flattened, it appears that her sister is dead and buried in a mass grave, but her son may have been rescued. The film follows her on the trail of her son, with her relationship with the taxi-driver slowly thawing. It appears she has just split from her husband, an international architect living in Dubai. They had sent their son home while they sorted themselves out, only for him to be caught in the war. They eventually locate him in a monastery, and have a dangerous drive across country to find him. Cruelly, it is a friend of the son, wearing his jacket: The boy, like his aunt had been killed in the bombing. Filmed on location immediately after the war, the film had, in the trite phrase, a shocking immediacy. The discussions between locals about what was going on were also illuminating: for most it wasn't their war, and Israel was where they wanted to be for work.

valis1949 In our modern and enlightened age there is no such thing as a 'Non-Combatant'. Whether we like it or not, each of us is on one side or the other. UNDER THE BOMBS tells the story of a young mother who is trying to find her sister and son during the ceasefire of the 2006 Israeli/Lebanon Conflict. She is a wealthy outsider from Dubai who enlists the aid of a sympathetic local cabbie who helps her track down her missing family. The film focuses on their budding friendship against the backdrop of actual war zone footage. Many of the scenes are unscripted, and are shot as the real events unfold, and make for compelling cinema. The film drives home the message that wars are putatively fought and lost for valid reasons, but there are never any winners-only losers. A very thought provoking look at the true cost of a nation's foreign policies.

laminee This is a really good film. And due to the fact that it was shot during the actual crisis gives it a documentary feel. Complimented with that is the superb acting of the lead characters. It's like real life unfolding on screen - the rampant destruction, needless pains & senseless atrocities of the war. The rustic music also suits the storyline perfectly.A couple sequences though didn't quite fit into the flow of the story: - the sex scene seemed unnecessary and the breaking down of the car at the very end seemed like a little forced upon melodrama.Would recommend this movie to anyone who is in a mood to find out how the Middle East politico-religious crisis affects a common citizen.

Chris Knipp Director Aractingi shot this film in the immediate wake of the systematic 34-day Israeli bombing of Lebanon in summer 2006, which left much of the country devastated, especially the South. He uses his own footage of the bombing itself, which shows whole neighborhoods being decimated, and then shoots among the rubble to tell the story of Zaina (Nada Abou Farhat), a divorced mother who comes from Dubai, where she was living with her architect husband, to find Karim, her six-year-old son, who was trapped by the bombing in Kherbet Salam, a Shia Muslim village in southern Lebanon. Zaina left Karim there with her sister, ironically, to "protect" him from the stress of her divorce. The only taxi driver who'll make the dangerous trip is Tony (George Khabbaz), a Christian who turns out to be from the South himself.Aractingi got the idea of shooting in war devastation with an improvised plot in 1989 as Lebanon's civil war of that time wound down, but fear prevented him from proceeding. Instead he shot 40 documentaries and one feature that used improvisation (the 2005 Bosta) and also starred Nada Abou Farhat. As he got to work with his cast and crew for Under the Bombs, beginning shooting during the bombing and continuing during the ceasefire, he made the decision not to deal with the war so much as its impact on innocent victims, which Zaina and Karim obviously are.And many of the people and their sufferings are authentic and real-time. When Tony and Zaina reach Kherbet Salam the building her sister lived in is completely destroyed. A young woman comes up and tells her Maha, her sister, is a martyr now. Zaina and Tony go to witness the disinterring of those who died to be reburied in "martyrs' graves," hoping to find the body of Maha (they do not). Aractingi films the actual funerals--not an easy task.People say Karim was taken up by foreign journalists and went away with them, and this leads Tony and Zaina further south, just a few kilometers from the Israeli border, where they stop over with Tony's Christian family. It emerges that they were collaborators during the long Israeli occupation of south Lebanon and one brother is among those who fled to live in Israel in the aftermath of that time. The confrontation between Tony and his relatives over this collaboration is the fruit of discussions among villagers which Aractingi and his co-writer, Michel Léviant, condensed into a script. This is one example of how the actual fed into the fictional in the day-to-day shooting.The emotions are powerful and the backgrounds are horrifying in the film. Nothing quite equals the sense of identification when Zaina looks at a whole street where her sister lived and finds only ruins after the systematic bombing destruction. Less successful at times are the interactions between Zaina and Tony, who flirts, comforts, and acts out a surprisingly graphic sex scene with a room clerk at a hotel they stop at on the way. Khabbaz and Abou Farhat are good, but some cutting might have helped eliminate distracting elements. The car's breaking down just before the couple gets to the monastery where Karim is rumored to be seems a rather obvious suspense device too.The film is neutral as it can be, perhaps to a fault. One wonders why Hezbollah is barely even mentioned, since it is the other party in the warfare, and was the prime provider of aid to the victims in the bombing's immediate aftermath. Though the collaborating family members refer to being "forced to work for the Devil," meaning Israel, the focus is on the suffering rather than its source. Aractingi's film has flaws, but its boldness in bringing to the screen the 2006 bombing of Lebanon and the civilian suffering it caused can't be faulted.The San Francisco International Film Festival 2008 provided the West Coast premiere of this film, which was scheduled to open less than two weeks later, on May 12, in Paris. This was nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance and received the EIUC Award at Venice.