Venice winner to Göteborg

The first prominent guest is confirmed. Scandinavias leading film festival gets ready to welcome Samuel Maoz and his Golden Lion winner Lebanon.

When Lebanon premiered in Venice it immediately became a favourite and when Maoz received the Golden Lion from the Head of the Jury, Ang Lee, he dedicated it to the war veterans of the world.

Lebanon takes place during the first Lebanon war  – in June 1982. A lone tank is dispatched to search a hostile town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli Air Force. What seems to be a simple mission gets gradually out of control and turns into a death trap, a shivering nightmare. The whole film is staged inside the tank where four inexperienced young lose their innocence as they struggle hard to survive in a situation they cannot contain anymore, desperately trying not to lose their humanity amid the chaos of war.

On June 6, 1982, at 6:15 AM, I killed a man for the first time in my life. I was 20 years old. (…) Twenty-five years after that miserable morning that opened the Lebanon War, I wrote the script for the film Lebanon. (…) When a person feels he has nothing to lose, he takes chances. That’s how I felt in early 2007 when I started to write the script for Lebanon, Samuel Maoz said about the work with the film which is based on his own experiences.

Samuel Maoz was born in Tel Aviv in 1962. At age 13, he received an 8mm movie camera and four minutes worth of film for his Bar Mitzvah. By the year he was 18, he had made dozens of short films. He was trained in the Armored Corps in the Israeli army, and participated in the Lebanon war in 1982. In 1987 he completed his cinema studies at the Beit Zvi Academy of the Arts. Lebanon is his first feature length film.