Lebanese short film Submarine was selected to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs between 8 and 18 September.

Written and directed by Mounia Akl, the film premiered internationally at the 69th Cannes festival, and is premiering in North America at Toronto, where It will screen on 11, 12 and 16 September.

The film stars Yumna Marwan, Julian Farhat, and Adel Chahine, and centers on a woman who refuses evacuation amidst Lebanon’s imminent garbage crisis.

The crisis escalated in the past year, as Lebanese residents began protesting about the streets being filled with garbage and the lack of response from policy-makers.

According to the film’s Arab World distributor MAD Solutions, “Submarine was awarded the James Bridges production grant, and will be made into a feature film that Mounia Akl is currently writing, and is set to be completed soon.”

Akl holds an MFA in directing and screenwriting from Columbia University in New York, and is best known for the popular TV and YouTube series titled Beirut, I Love You (I Love You Not).

She is the co-founder of Breaking Wave Pictures, which she began in 2015 with 7 collegues from Columbia.

Among Akl’s previous work are a number of award-winning shorts like Christine, EVA, Anoesis, and Fasateen web series.

According to MAD Solutions, Akl has recently finished the editing of the award-winning Spanish film El Adios. Mounia also co-wrote the short film The President's Visit, currently in pre-production, that has been awarded a Katharina Otto-Bernstein Film Fund award, and a Doha Film Institute Production Grant.


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