French-Lebanese short IF THE SUN DROWNED INTO AN OCEAN OF CLOUDS — directed, written, and co-edited by Wissam Charaf alongside Clémence Diard — just won two awards at the recently concluded Beirut Shorts International Film Festival, where it won Best Short Film and the Emile Chahine Award For Cinematic Excellence.
 
This comes just a few days before its anticipated screening at the 23rd edition of the CinemaMed - Festival Cinéma Méditerranéen de Bruxelles, which will be taking place from December 1st to the 8th at various locations across Brussels, Belgium.
 
The film is set to screen on Saturday, December 2nd, at 4:45 pm at Aventure Cinema.
IF THE SUN DROWNED INTO AN OCEAN OF CLOUDS world premiered in the Orizzonti section at the Venice International Film Festival, and featured at several prestigious festivals such as the Cinemed - Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention.
 
The short was also featured at the Stockholm, Cork, Arab, Aix-en-Provence Tous Courts, Beirut Shorts, and Ciudades Reveladas – Muestra Internacional de Cine y Ciudad film festivals.
 
The film — which is set on the waterfront of a construction site in Beirut, Lebanon — is a poetic story about unfulfilled dreams; a universal tale about a man who will have to take an odd path in order to exist, and follows Raed — a security guard who must prevent passers-by from accessing the shoreline. 
 
Yet, as the horizon becomes more obscured with every passing day by the under-construction building, Raed begins finding himself in all manner of peculiar encounters — or maybe mere dreams and figments of his desires?
 
The short film stars Raed Yassin, Rodrigue Sleiman, Said Serhan, and Hala Dabaji, and was lensed by Martin Rit, produced by Charlotte Vincent and Katia Khazak (Aurora Films), co-produced by Pierre Sarraf (Né à Beyrouth Films), with sound by Emmanuel Zouki, and music by The Incompetents. MAD Solutions handles the film’s Arab World distribution and sales.
 
Born in Beirut in 1973, Wissam Charaf is a French-Lebanese director who has directed seven short films, including UNFORGETTABLE MEMORY OF A FRIEND, which received an award at the 2019 Clermont-Ferrand Festival.
 
Before that, Charaf’s first fiction feature film HEAVEN SENT was selected for the ACID Section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and his second fiction feature DIRTY DIFFICULT DANGEROUS opened the Giornate degli Autori Section of the 2022 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Europa Cinemas Award, before being awarded at the 2023 Palm Springs Film Festival.
 
IF THE SUN DROWNED INTO AN OCEAN OF CLOUDS is set to be the third collaboration between Charaf and MAD.