Tayeb, khalas, yalla

The Lebanese city of Tripoli may be an attractive tourist destination but if you live in one of its suburban prefab complexes it’s nothing to get excited about. Especially if you share a small ground-floor flat with your meticulous elderly mother. The protagonist, a 40-something man who runs a small sweet shop, has had just about enough of endless conversations, card parties, and boring get-togethers with his mother’s friends. But when his mother leaves for Beirut one day without even telling him, he feels overwhelmed and deceived. He suddenly finds that he’s not ready to live alone, realizing that his newfound independence is far from what he had imagined. The only source of amusement to break up his monotonous existence is a neighborhood urchin.... In its own small way, this documentary-style tragicomedy by a duo of debuting filmmakers touches on the global topic of broken family ties and the loneliness suffered in our outwardly “user-friendly” modern society. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)