The Ugly One

North American Premiere!

Filmmaker Eric Baudelaire in person for Q&A!

A sequel of sorts to The Anabasis…, Baudelaire’s second feature takes as its starting point a script and a set of directions given to him by the Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, whose voiceover narration intrudes occasionally to meditate on memory and militancy. Baudelaire deviates considerably from Adachi’s text in presenting the story of Lili (Juliette Navis) and Michel (Rabih Mroué), who meet on a beach in Beirut. Their interactions reveal a traumatic shared past marked by an act of terrorism and the loss of a loved one. The contrapuntal interplay of this elegiac narrative and Adachi’s memories of insurrection and revolutionary regret produces a work that is as moving as it is intellectually and politically challenging.