Private Project

DODGEM

In an insecure suburb of Beirut, Nour, a Lebanese transvestite, meets Vanesa, a Spanish model who poses for a photographic project and both set up a bizarre relationship. The project is blocked. Nothing happens as predicted. Vanesa stays in the apartment, feels bored, drinks too much alcohol and is lost in her dreams. Nour frequently visits his violent lover and realizes his marginal habits. In the street, young boys beat some people with slingshots…

  • Christophe Karabache
    Director
  • Christophe Karabache
    Writer
  • Visiosfeir
    Producer
  • Vanesa Prieto
    Key Cast
  • Shaker Shihane
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Feature
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 36 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    January 7, 2014
  • Country of Origin:
    France
  • Country of Filming:
    Lebanon
  • Language:
    Arabic
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Lebanese Film Festival
    Beirut
    June 9, 2014
  • Barcelona Erotic&Bizarre Art Film Festival
    Barcelona
  • The Hong Kong Arthouse Film Festival
    Hong Kong
    March 25, 2016
  • L'Entrepôt - Festival Liban sans limites
    Paris
    France
    March 5, 2015
  • Cinema Studio Galande
    Paris
    March 26, 2014
Distribution Information
  • Visiosfeir Distribution
    Country: France
Director Biography - Christophe Karabache

Christophe Karabache is a French-Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in Beirut in 1979, he completed his Masters in Cinema Studies at Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle (France) and through a joint program at The University of Iowa (USA).
Karabache began his exploration of film at l’Etna, an alternative workshop in Paris. He initially made experimental films.
His current filmmaking practice shifts between documentary and fiction.
His films have been showcased at several international film festivals (in the USA, Lebanon, New Caledonia, Bosnia, Canada, UK, Greece, France, Benine, Australia, Hungary, Germany, Venezuela, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania, Poland, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Italy, India, Ireland, Bulgaria, Chile, etc.) and theatrically released in movie theaters in France by Visiosfeir Distribution. In 2018, he signed a global distribution deal with Shami Media Group (New York).

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Director Statement

No one talks to anyone, but people scream and hit each other. Waiting/wandering/ escape/death.
Nobody is innocent and there’s no real victim. On DODGEM, the most spontaneous action is murder, a world in which people act under impulsion and don’t obey to their minds anymore but they are trained by instinct with slingshots. When man lets himself overflow by his own nature, he becomes a “wild animal”, but also a weak, vulnerable and suffering being. By touching this nudity of feelings, he is at the same time more violent and human.
Tormented, shell-shocked, lost and grotesque, characters on this film are obstructed in an infernal spiral revealing the wounds still weeping on a Lebanese society knocked about its history exposing the suffering, a suffering of the body at present, and showing an art that brutally remains next to the enraged people who consider, as André Breton does, that “beauty might be convulsive or not”.