Badran Roy Badran
- Director
- Writer
Born on April 19, 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, Roy Badran was raised (or
stuck) in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, with a young mother, a
missing father (returned home when war ended), and a child sister.
After war, Roy Badran's neighbor, a video shop owner, closed his
destroyed shop forever, and gave him a box full of VHS tapes. The box
contained some of Ingmar Bergman's films, Andrei Tarkovsky's, Federico
Fellini's, Sergei Eisenstein's, classical Hollywood cinema, German
expressionist films etc. Directly after his high school graduation, Roy
Badran wrote and directed an occult christian play: "Saint Simon is
dead!" A two leveled stage with moving background walls and 40
actors... "Saint Simon is Dead!" made more than 3000 entries on its
first and only night (then it was banned by the church). During his
stay in the film school, Roy Badran gained his reputation quickly among
his fellow students who were pleased to work with him. 'Badran Roy
Badran' and his team managed to screen several independent videos to
audience in Beirut, which attracted the press and the critics towards
the undergraduate writer-director. At the age of 23, he started writing
"A Play Entitled Sehnsucht" the first abstract feature film in the
Middle East, and it reflects the incurable self destructive feeling
that Lebanon is suffering from today, through Bernard Zeidan the
astronomer who died in a Lebanese mental hospital in 2008. Bernard
Zeidan's death left a major effect on the young writer-director, who
expressed his fury publicly in his shocking speech during the
avant-premiere of the film in Beirut: (June 2011) " It was your civil
war that locked Bernard Zeidan in the asylum! And it's your nonchalance
and sickening denial of your criminal past that killed him!" (Bernard
Zeidan never existed in the real life, but the rumor has it that Roy
Badran has spent two years observing a certain mental astronomer who
was kept inside a Lebanese psychiatric hospital.) Badran Roy Badran
directed "A Play Entitled Sehnsucht" over a period of five years.
