Biography

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.
- IMDb mini biography by: Sara Haddad