Beirut, August 2020. Mounia, a 25-year-old, is desperately looking for her cat, roaming the streets of a city shattered by the devastating port explosion. In her second short film, غروب بيروت (The Sun Sets on Beirut), writer-director Daniela Stephan cleverly uses a docufiction approach to craft a poignant narrative that reflects the conflicted emotions of a generation of Lebanese caught between their homeland, its political turmoil, and their own personal dreams.

"In an instant, everything changed. My locations were gone, reduced to rubble. I didn’t have a film, or a city, anymore"

Stephan was writing a different script for her graduation project from the London Film School when the August 4th blast struck. “Then, in an instant, everything changed. My locations were gone, reduced to rubble. I didn’t have a film, or a city, anymore. And for days, I didn’t even have my cat”, she shared with us. The Sun Sets On Beirut was born from her questioning her role as a filmmaker in the wake of such tragedy: “ If cinema couldn’t change the world, it could ask the right questions, preserve memory, and build community”, she explained.

Her own cat went missing for three days after the explosion, making the film’s premise close to her own personal experience. From that starting point, Stephan creates three characters on a mission to find the animal, allowing the film to take us on a journey, wandering the streets of post-explosion Beirut. The result is both an immersion into the city’s resilient spirit - as it tries to pick itself back up and move forward - and an intimate encounter with its community in recovery. Shot with a stripped-down aesthetic, the visual approach adds a level of authenticity, with the photography offering us a perspective as if we were on the scooter with her characters, taking in the graffiti and urban details that subtly flesh out Mounia and Ghady’s environment.

[caption id="attachment_41366" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Sun Sets On Beirut Short Film

"We stripped the production down to its rawest form ... It felt wrong to prioritize expensive cameras when the world around us had collapsed." - Stephan on her approach.[/caption]

The film also stands as a portrait of Lebanese youth, captured through its three protagonists. Olivia, a British journalist, is our entry point as she documents the search, prompting the others to share who they are and what it means to live in Beirut. As an outsider, she gets to ask questions that confront their heritage, generational trauma, and different views. Subtly, we get to see them navigating the immediate grief of the explosion and how it fits in the resilience they’ve already been forced to have. While the search for the cat could seem irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, it presents the perfect exposition to dig deeper into these characters’ lives - as young people from Beirut, uncertain about their future.

The Sun Sets on Beirut made its way around the festival circuit between 2022 and 2024, with notable stops at the Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Tampere, Amman and Les Nuits Méditerranéennes du Court Métrage - where it won the Grand Prix. Stephan is currently developing a new short film with the support of the Doha Film Institute and is also working on her first feature.