Nadine Labaki
An actress first, and it shows in how she directs. Labaki was already a familiar face in Lebanon in the early 2000s before she made anything of her own, and when her filmmaking career began in 2007 with Caramel, she cast herself in it as Layale, one of the women the film follows. Directors who come up through performance tend to shoot faces, and she does.
Her subject has been consistent since: everyday Lebanese life, filmed close, with politics arriving through domestic detail rather than being announced over the top of it. War, poverty and the position of women are all in the work, but they reach the audience through a haircut, a rent argument, a queue. Capernaum (2018), her third film as director, pushed that method somewhere much harsher, and it made her the first female Arab director nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. She appears in it too, in a role that shares her first name.
The credits listed here are the acting ones, which makes this an odd page for someone the world knows as a director: Alice in the French thriller Mea Culpa (2014), herself in a segment of the anthology Rio, I Love You, Yasmine in The Sand Castle (2024). Her directing credits are not among them.
Movies (8)
Where to start with Nadine Labaki
Caramel is the place to begin, and it is the gentlest thing she has been involved with: a group portrait of women in Beirut that lets the politics sit in the background where it belongs. She plays Layale, so you get the performer and the sensibility in one go.
Then Capernaum, which is the major work and much rougher going. It is a film built around non-professional performers and real conditions, and her own appearance in it is deliberately small. Watch the two in order and the progression is obvious: the same eye, aimed at something with far less cushioning.
For her purely acting work, Mea Culpa is a straightforward French thriller that uses her as a dramatic presence rather than a director's alter ego, and The Sand Castle is the recent English-language one. Rio, I Love You is a curiosity, a single anthology segment in which she plays herself.