Living Through Chronic War

A Sad and Beautiful World 2025

Directed by Cyril Aris

Official Submission to

the 98th Academy Awards

The film opens with an explosion unfolding simultaneously with two childbirths. Birth is the very first image we encounter, yet it is immediately intertwined with sirens and destruction. This opening prepares us for a war film, but A Sad and Beautiful World quickly chooses a different path. Rather than remaining on the battlefield, the camera moves into the streets, cafés, restaurants, and homes of Beirut, suggesting that its true concern is not war itself, but the experience of living through it.

Beirut is far more than a setting. It functions as a character whose presence permeates every frame. A city that has endured decades of wars and recurring crises, Beirut carries their traces in its architecture, streets, harbour, and collective memory. Repeated images of the harbour, the waterfront, and the city’s skyline transform Beirut into a place of unexpected serenity. Initially defined by destruction, the city gradually reveals another layer of its identity. This is the Beirut to which the characters repeatedly return in their imagination—a place that is at once a refuge and a wound.

The film constructs its meaning through recurring visual motifs rather than dialogue. The family restaurant’s kitchen, meals prepared day after day, the elderly poet in the café, abandoned railway carriages, the harbour, bridges, and old houses all quietly enrich the film’s exploration of migration, separation, love, and loneliness. None of these elements functions as an overt symbol. Instead, they are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the narrative, shaping the characters’ lived experience.

Birth remains the film’s central motif—not only in its opening sequence but throughout the entire narrative. Love, friendship, family, food, and even Nino’s humour all grow out of that first moment when life insists on beginning alongside war. Rather than opposing life and death, the film allows them to coexist in the same space and reality.

One of the film’s most delicate achievements lies in its portrayal of Nino and Yasmina’s different responses to trauma. Both lost their childhood to war. Yasmina experienced the collapse of her family amid political turmoil, while Nino witnessed the death of his parents in a missile attack. They carry the same historical wound, yet the film reminds us that trauma does not inevitably produce identical destinies.

Yasmina embodies the desire to leave. Her constant smoking, restrained silence, and exhausted gaze reveal someone searching for a future beyond Lebanon.

Nino, by contrast, chooses to remain. His decision is not rooted in blind patriotism but in a determination to preserve what survives of childhood, family, and home. Through his grandfather, poetry, the family restaurant, and shared memories, remaining becomes an act of quiet resistance. Even the imagined house overlooking the hills of Beirut is less a romantic fantasy than a vision of belonging—a place where love and homeland become inseparable.

The film refuses to judge either choice. Leaving and staying emerge as equally human responses to the same inherited wound.

Jo Saade’s cinematography echoes the film’s philosophy. Calm compositions, natural light, and warm colour palettes set Beirut apart from the familiar visual clichés of war cinema. Rather than dwelling on destruction, the camera lingers on the persistence of everyday life: meals are still prepared, poetry is still recited, children still fall in love, and people continue to walk along the sea.

Ultimately, the film offers no definitive answer as to whether staying or leaving is the right choice. Instead, it presents a city where war has not disappeared but has settled into memory, relationships, and the rhythm of everyday life. Perhaps this is where the film’s central insight emerges: war becomes chronic when it is no longer visible only in explosions, but also in love, migration, waiting, memory, and even birth. Rather than depicting devastation, A Sad and Beautiful World bears witness to life’s quiet persistence.