Tramontane

The young musician Rabih is blind, but he has an amazing voice. When his band is going on tour in Europe, Rabih needs a passport. At the passport office he’s told that his ID card probably is a fake. To make things worse, his birth certificate was lost during the war in 1989 and his mother refuses to take a DNA test to confirm they are related. Buried secrets from his past begin to resurface. Rabih’s fumbling for answers to his questions about his own past functions as a parallel to Lebanon’s great problem as a nation; how to move forward without facing the demons of your past. The director never gets into the dirty details of who belonged to which side, and who did what during the Lebanese civil war. Instead he only gives us hints, and rather puts Barakat Jabbour, who plays Rabih, at the center as the driving force of the movie.

Vatche Boulghourjian (b. 1975) from Kuwait, is known for his work on Tramontane (2016), Hinkerort zorasune (2010) and Ali the Iraqi (2008). Tramontane has been nominated for several awards at international film festivals, among them the prestigious festival in Cannes.

Read the review of Tramontane in Variety here.