Badran Roy Badran

Badran Roy Badran is a Lebanese film director and screenwriter. Born Roy Badran (Badran was added to his name during his stay in the Lebanese film school) on April 19, 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon. Roy 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’s neighbour, a video shop owner, closed his destroyed shop forever, and gave Roy a box full of VHS tapes...
“The box was full of movies, the schools were closed, the streets were still dangerous and unsafe, so I spent my childhood sitting home and watching these VHS tapes... I never knew that most of these films are what they make you watch and analyse in film school!”
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 met Celine Abiad (his future producer) and decided to write and direct a Christian musical play: “Saint Simon” with the concept of a two-level stage and background moving walls, which made more than 3000 entries on its first and only night, and created a certain reputation around the young promising tandem (Roy Badran-Celine Abiad).
Roy decided to join film school; he studied in ALBA (academie libanaise des beaux arts) for one year, and then graduated from Notre Dame University film school in Lebanon (2008).
During his stay in the film school, Roy gained his reputation quickly among his fellow students who were pleased to work with the tandem Badran Roy Badran (writer-director) and Celine Abiad (producer). The undergraduate tandem and their team managed to screen several independent documentaries to audience in Beirut, and a short film: “rock or roukoz?” which attracted the press and the critics towards the talented tandem.
At the age of 23, Roy started writing A Play Entitled Sehnsucht the first experimental surrealist feature film in the Middle East, which reflects the incurable self destructive feeling that Lebanon suffers from, through Bernard Zeidan the Lebanese 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!”
Badran Roy Badran directed A Play Entitled Sehnsucht over a period of five years, under the motto: “No Compromise!” along with Celine Abiad the creative producer who worked hand in hand with him to make his first feature film see the light.
On his last public appearance, Badran Roy Badran expressed interest in making a War Film, that will be based on his childhood memories and nightmares that he still suffers from. The film is apparently under development.

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