Sarah Francis, who grew up and studied in Beirut, has spent more than a decade crafting films that drift between the inner world and the physical one. Her cinema is defined by sonic landscapes, visual tableaus, oneiric realms and a persistent curiosity about how we inhabit spaces – geographical, emotional, and existential.
In her debut documentary feature Birds of September (2013), which premiered in the main competition at CPH:DOX before travelling to festivals and museums worldwide, a transparent van roams the streets of Beirut, exploring the city from behind the glass with a camera, capturing moments of life and intimate confessions.
In her next effort, As Above, So Below (2020), launched at the Berlin International Film Festival and continued its journey across international screens, people roam at the foot of a cloud-covered mountain range, while the Moon watches them, both present and absent.
With Dead Dog (2025) — which premiered earlier this year at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and recently came up as the top winner in the Horizons of Arab Cinema competition at the Cairo International Film Festival, deserving the Saad Eldin Wahba Award for Best Arab Film — Sarah turns more intimately inward while remaining faithful to her signature exploration of in-between states.
She directs her lens toward the quiet spaces between people, to the residue of time, and to the liminal state between belonging and estrangement.
This chamber piece of two actors, one house, and a silence thick with memory, opens with the main character, Aida, who arrives at a mountain villa.
Rain, pine trees, leftover furniture — the scattered grammar of Lebanese memory. Her husband, Walid, who has long lived abroad, appears unannounced. Their encounter seems accidental, yet inevitable.
Temporarily reunited in the same enclosed space, they begin to orbit one another with a mix of restraint and recognition. Their spoken exchanges — about their daughter, the house, the weather — skim the surface, while the real conversation remains submerged: time, absence, a love eroded not by catastrophe but by distance.
The film touches upon something once alive that now hovers, quietly and hauntingly, between two people who have forgotten how to tackle each other's presence.
'We exist in the meantime'
Sarah does not distinguish sharply between fiction and documentary. "I don't decide to make fiction or documentary," she tells The New Arab. "I start with minimal elements – time, space, two bodies – and it expands."
Her earlier-mentioned films fused observational cinema with a visual essay. They investigated movement, displacement, and the relationship between inner landscapes and the real, physical ones we inhabit.
With Dead Dog, she continues that exploration, but narrows her spectrum. Gone are cities, strangers, and wandering landscapes. Instead, she folds everything into one house, one couple, a suspended moment in time.
"I'm interested in transitional spaces. The meantime. Spaces that are not yet defined, where multiple realities can be true at the same time," she reflects.
In the film, Aida and Walid live somewhere between past tenderness and present indifference. Nothing catastrophic has happened; a marriage hasn't exploded, it has simply eroded. They speak politely, sometimes nostalgically. They avoid confession. They touch, then retract. They are, above all, uncertain.
What remains when love fades not with violence, but with distance?
Never really here, never really gone
Sarah hints at, but never foregrounds, Lebanon's civil war and its long, unfinished aftermath. Aida and Walid met just after the war ended — a period marked by optimism, exhaustion, and a fragile attempt at reconstruction. But the rupture never truly healed.
"The civil war lasted fifteen years," Sarah reminds us, "and the film was shot before the most recent wars still happening now in the south. We're still in a war that hasn't really ended."
For her, the couple's quiet crisis mirrors the country's own suspended state. Their story is intimate, but not isolated.
"What's happening with them," she says, "is happening to younger couples now as well. It's universal, yes, but also profoundly Lebanese."
Lebanon's identity has long been shaped by movement, departure, and return. "We have maybe fourteen or fifteen million Lebanese abroad and five million in the country," Sarah explains.
Waves of emigration have followed every national rupture: the late 1800s, the long civil war, the 2006 war, the 2019 economic collapse, and now renewed conflict again.
"People leave, but they never fully arrive anywhere else," she says. "They stay suspended between places. Never really here, never really gone."
Walid is one such figure. A man who emigrated alone, unable to return, unable to truly belong where he landed. Aida, meanwhile, stayed: rooted, but restless; attached to a home that is itself falling apart.
The inherited house becomes, in Sarah's words, "part of a bigger ecosystem" — a quiet witness to wars, migration, absence, and the subtle erosion of daily life.
She describes the couple as living "between different times, different spaces," their emotional reality shaped by the country's chronic instability.
"Reconstruction in Lebanon always comes with ups and downs," she says.
"People have hope for a new government, and then everything collapses again. It's quite common here for the whole family to emigrate, or sometimes only the man leaves. He becomes suspended, floating between places, not knowing where he belongs."
In Dead Dog, this sense of displacement is not simply political; it is existential. Aida and Walid's emotional fracture reflects a national condition: the feeling of being split, of living several truths at once, of inhabiting a home that is both sanctuary and reminder of everything that has been lost.
Cinema of silence
Though nearly theatrical in form — two characters in one location — Dead Dog resists the logic of dialogue-driven chamber drama. Sarah leans instead into image, rhythm, stillness: a static camera, unspoken glances, the weight of silence.
Coming from work deeply rooted in space and temporality, Sarah approached the film not only through character but through their relation to place, rhythm, and time.
"Originally there was more dialogue," she recalls, "but when the actors performed it, they found their own pace. And in the editing, we realised the silences said more. The images already carried what needed to be said."
Her restraint is deliberate: muted gestures, pauses thick with atmosphere, flickering light, objects that hold the memory of touch. The couple is the centre of the story, yet never the centre of the universe.
"They belong to a larger ecosystem," Sarah explains. "Their story matters — but it's part of a bigger world where things keep happening around them."
Between scenes, an anonymous voice appears – not quite a narrator, not quite memory – recalling fragments of the couple's life through objects found in the house: a photograph, a magazine clipping, a door scratched by the dog now gone.
Is this voice a glue? Or a fracture? "I don't know if it's glue," Sarah says.
"Maybe it's fragmentation. The viewer becomes part of the process, the one connecting the pieces."
Casting presence, not performance
The casting of Dead Dog is crucial: two actors, one house, a relationship built on silence. How does one select performers whose presence must carry a film that says so much by saying so little?
"When I approached Chirine, I didn't yet know she had studied psychology," she shares regarding the actress who plays Aida, Chirine Karameh, winner of the Cairo Industry Days' Next Generation Award, recognising emerging talents in the film industry.
"I knew her from her years in theatre, dance, and performance. She always had this incredibly interesting aura – an ability to convey layers of emotion with almost no words. Her body language, the way she occupies space… It's very immediate, very raw, yet also minimalistic."
Chirine had been living abroad, in Japan, after taking a step back from performing professionally. Sarah wasn't sure she would say yes.
"But she did, and I was thrilled. This is her first feature film. And she brought that theatre discipline with her: every take was fully alive, fully present. If I asked to repeat a line, she preferred to redo the entire scene. She doesn't fragment emotion; she inhabits it."
Her screen partner, Nida Wakim, came to Sarah through the film itself.
"He and Chirine had acted together in a short, so there was already a subtle familiarity," she explains.
"Like his character, he also lives abroad. He understands what it means to emigrate, to feel in-between, to return to an old family home that no longer fully belongs to you."
In Dead Dog, Nida's character moves with a palpable uncertainty — hesitating at doorframes, sitting on the edge of the bed, unsure whether to sleep beside his estranged wife, whether to cross thresholds both literal and emotional. The contrast with Aida, who appears more grounded, more decisive, is striking.
Sarah explains: "I did want to explore this pressure placed on the one who leaves, especially if it's a man leaving alone. There's an expectation of success, of performing a certain narrative for the people back home. When that narrative fractures or doesn't align with reality, it creates a discontinuity within the self. That's the unsettling space Walid lives in."
The question of why Sarah Francis is drawn to characters suspended between places and selves resurfaces.
"I think displacement is not always dramatic," she tells The New Arab.
"Sometimes it's quiet. It's in the small failures we don't speak about, the identities we try on in different countries, the pressure of belonging somewhere we no longer inhabit fully. I'm drawn to these in-between states, not departure or arrival, but the meantime where you're not sure who you are supposed to be."
In Dead Dog, that meantime is palpable — a tension between two people who once shared a life and now share only a room, a night, a history that flickers like a dying flame. It is a film where presence outweighs performance, where silence becomes language, and where actors must embody emotions that cannot or will not be spoken.
Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films