Lebanese director Sarah Francis brought her quietly devastating marital drama “Dead Dog” to the Cairo Film Festival’s Horizons of Arab Cinema Competition, where the film won the Saad Eldin Wahba Award for best Arabic film. When we met with Francis ahead of the closing ceremony, the impact of the film, anchored by intimate performances from Chirine Karameh and Nida Wakim, was already rippling through the festival.
For Karameh, who had stepped away from acting for years, the project became an unexpected artistic re-entry. She later won best actress at the Next Generation Awards, presented during Cairo Industry Days’ closing ceremony.
Karameh told Variety how Francis’ vision pulled her back to the craft she thought she’d left behind: “Deep inside, there was always a quiet place telling me something was still waiting for me. When I learned the project was with Sarah, something immediately shifted.”
“Dead Dog” was produced by Lara Abou Saifan and the team at Placeless Films, whose early commitment, Francis said, helped build the film’s stripped-down emotional world. The film’s Arab world sales are handled by MAD Distribution, while MAD World oversees its global distribution. It premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam before traveling to São Paulo, Sarajevo and Cairo.
Below, Francis speaks to Variety about how she built the film’s fragile emotional terrain, made the shift from hybrid work to fiction, and the collaborative process behind “Dead Dog.”
You come from a hybrid and documentary background. What sparked “Dead Dog,” and why tell it as fiction?
I rarely know how an idea starts. Sometimes it’s an image, sometimes it’s a scene. With this film, it began with two people who know each other well meeting in a kind of transitional space, a temporary moment in time. I wanted to explore the misunderstanding or miscommunication between them, and as I followed that thread, the story of Aida and Walid unfolded.
They meet over four days in a mountain house he inherited from his parents, a place they don’t really live in, almost semi-abandoned. I was interested in working with very minimal elements: two people, one place, one specific slice of time. And at the same time, certain objects, like a photograph, a letter, open windows into other moments in their relationship. It becomes like a constellation of linked moments.
What did the move from hybrid forms to fiction allow you to explore that you couldn’t before?
With fiction, suddenly there’s a whole architecture you need to build — wardrobe, camera choices, shot lists, and so many practical questions. Some things were very clear in my mind, and others were completely new. Working with actors was also challenging but very interesting.
Even with all that preparation, you’re still confronted with the reality of the moment: what the actors bring, how the scene feels that day, even the weather. In a way, it became similar to a documentary again. You watch what’s happening in front of you, sense what’s important, decide what you can let go of, and follow the thread that presents itself.
Emigration shapes the distance between Aida and Walid. Why did you choose to root the story in that specific Lebanese reality?
It wasn’t something I started with, but as I developed the characters, it felt obvious that Walid would be part of that reality. Emigration has been common in Lebanon for more than a century, even before the civil war, during it, and after every crisis, and today the diaspora is larger than the population inside the country. Often the man leaves alone and returns only occasionally.
So Walid is someone who isn’t fully anchored anywhere. He’s not settled abroad, but he also can’t easily come back, because he’s unsure what he would be returning to. Meanwhile, Aida has been living through Lebanon’s difficulties alone, while raising their daughter, managing daily life, enduring the constant instability. Naturally, each of them carries disappointments and expectations that were never met.
What truly interested me, though, wasn’t emigration as a subject but the emotional space it creates. They’re both in a transitional moment, searching for a center of their relationship and of themselves. Nothing feels fixed, not feelings, not decisions, not even the sense of safety their marriage once promised. That uncertainty became the heart of the film.
The relationship between Aida and Walid feels intimate but fractured. How did you approach working with the actors to build that emotional history?
Both actors live abroad, so they arrived a few weeks before the shoot for rehearsals. That time was essential. We didn’t just go through the script, we talked a lot about who these two people were before the film starts, defining why they first got married, what each of them expected, what disappointed them, and what they were carrying into this moment. Together we built a kind of shared history, and at the same time each actor also developed their own private backstory. I think that combination gave the characters a richer inner life.
There were also moments when their real opinions about certain things, especially around gender roles or expectations, didn’t align. They sometimes had different views in real life, just as their characters do. That dynamic slipped naturally into their scenes and made the tension between Aida and Walid feel very true.
By the time we began shooting, each actor had formed a very specific “truth” of who their character was. Those truths didn’t always match perfectly in a given moment, which was actually very helpful. The friction, the misunderstandings, the tenderness all came from the perspectives they had fully internalized. The performances felt natural because they were acting from a place they had built and believed in.
Silence plays a major role in the film both emotionally and structurally. How did you decide when dialogue was needed and when silence could say more?
The script originally had more dialogue, but during rehearsal and shooting, we always ran entire scenes from the beginning, even if we only needed to adjust one line. The actors settled into a rhythm together, and often we realized the scene was already clear through their looks, their body language, or how they moved in the space.
Sound and music were also essential. With Victor Bresse, the sound designer, we worked to create a very minimal but still impactful world around the characters. And with the original music by Rabih Gebeile, I felt he added a complementary layer, not repeating the film’s emotions, but telling the story in another tone, almost like a narrator with its own voice.
Cairo is a major platform for Arab filmmakers. What did it mean to you to screen “Dead Dog” in the Horizons of Arab Cinema Competition, and what were you hoping regional audiences would take from it?
We were all very excited to be in Cairo with this film because Cairo is really a hub for cinema and has such a rich history. Chirine (Aida), Lara (producer), my family, so many of us grew up watching Egyptian films. Being here felt like entering a space that belongs to so many people in the Arab world. And the fact that the festival has a genuine public audience was important for us.
After the screening, an Egyptian woman came up to me and said that with everything happening in the region, so much of our cinema has become centered on catastrophe, which is understandable and necessary. But watching “Dead Dog” gave her a sense of relief, because she felt: “I exist as well.” She was grateful to see a small story about human beings and intimate, existential questions.
That meant a lot to me. I think everyday stories also deserve space. People still live, love, separate, and question themselves even in difficult times. I don’t feel every film needs to represent an entire nation’s trauma. These quiet stories matter too.
The film received key support from Doha Film Institute, the Red Sea Film Fund, and others. What did that support bring to the project?
Doha were the first funders, they also supported my first film, and that trust meant a lot. Starting a film in Lebanon is extremely hard given the economic crisis and the lack of a solid industry infrastructure. Red Sea supported us in post-production at exactly the moment we needed it to finish the film.
I also felt part of a regional cinematic community rather than isolated. And none of this would have been possible without Placeless Films. Lara Abou Saifan and the producing team trusted the script from the very beginning. We never had to fight over vision. By chance, we also became an all-women producing/directing team, which created a very warm and collaborative partnership.