Product Details

• Actors: Rami Doueiri, Naamar Sahli, Mohamad Chamas, Rola Al Amin, Carmen Lebbos
• Directors: Ziad Doueiri
• Writers: Ziad Doueiri
• Producers: Bjørn Eivind Aarskog, Jean Bréhat, Rachid Bouchareb
• Format: Color, Letterboxed, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: Arabic, French
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: New Yorker Video
• VHS Release Date: April 24, 2001
• Run Time: 105 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005ALOX
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #96,833 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Ziad Doueiri established his credentials as the assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino's early films, but his feature debut, West Beirut, belongs to the more European strain of coming-of-age films than Tarantino's cool crime wave. Tarek is a rebellious class clown and aspiring filmmaker, a restless Lebanese teenager who rails against European colonialism with little acts of defiance at the French High School of Beirut. It's 1975. Fighter jets ominously scream overhead, soldier convoys rumble through the streets, and the tensions that grip the city explode when a violent terrorist attack sinks Beirut into civil war.

Tarek, played by director Doueiri's younger brother Rami in a spirited, charming performance, becomes Ziad's cinematic alter ego and a spiritual cousin to François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel. When a military blockade splits the city in half, cutting Tarek and his friends off from their school, the war zone becomes their playground. Doueiri never slights the danger of their situation and fills the background with telling detail (from snipers and booby traps to the increasing racial and religious intolerance), but his heart is with the adolescent adventure of his recklessly naïve kids. He captures an excitement and energetic curiosity only possible in the innocence of youth as they dodge military patrols, sneak across checkpoints, shoot their Super 8 movies, and fall in love in the shadow of war. Former Police drummer Stewart Copeland provides a funky rhythmic score with a Mideast inflection, easily one of his best. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker

The Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri left his native Beirut at the age of twenty, came to America, wound up as a cameraman on Quentin Tarantino pictures, and has now returned to his home town to make his first feature. The best début movies have a quality all their own-a kind of breathless, jolting ebullience, suggesting that young filmmakers would burst if they didn't get to tell their stories. Doueiri is one such enthusiast; his movie has its rough patches and, toward the end, its slightly damp longueurs, but it nails a time and a place so firmly that, when it ends, you feel bereft. Based largely on Doueiri's own teen-age years, it stars his brother Rami as Tarek, a Beirut schoolboy with a sly smile. Tarek lives with his parents, Hala (Carmen Lebbos) and Riad (Joseph Bou Nassar), in the Muslim area of East Beirut; the tale begins in April, 1975, when sectarian rivalries split the city in two. Suddenly, Tarek and his friend Omar (Mohamad Chamas) are unable to attend school in the Eastern sector; the simple act of getting film developed involves a mortal risk. There are extraordinary scenes here as moments of light comedy flip casually into the treacherous, and vice versa; if you want solid political history, the film is no more than an infuriating sketch, but as an exercise in the unpredictable it shows both nerve and charm. Weirder still, the whole thing has a tang of the familiar; even boys in Beirut, it seems, stuck Bruce Lee posters on their bedroom walls. In Arabic. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A compelling coming-of-age story, March 29, 2001

By 

Joseph Leydon "(a.k.a. Joe Leydon)" (Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: West Beirut [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Tarek (Rami Doueiri) is the kind of anarchic class clown who's often ejected from classes by impatient teachers. While exiled to a hallway one afternoon, he looks out a window and sees hooded gunmen slaughter the passengers of a bus. It's April 13, 1975, and Lebanon's civil war has just begun in this semi-autobiographical drama by writer-director Ziad Doueiri (a UCLA-trained filmmaker who has worked as a cinematographer for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez). With his younger brother cast in the lead role, Doueiri spins an uncommonly compelling coming-of-age story about life and loyalties in a divided city. At first, Tarek and his buddy Omar (Mohammad Chamus) are too caught up in their day-to-day lives, and too happy about the closing of their school, to worry much about the schism between Christian-controlled East Beirut and a West Beirut controlled by Muslim militias. But as the ethnic and religious clashes intensify, Tarek is forced to confront the collateral damage outside his apartment (bombs reduce buildings to rubble, soldiers and snipers control key thoroughfares) and within his family (his parents repeatedly quarrel over whether they should abandon their homeland). "West Beirut" is at once vividly detailed and effectively understated as it views war through the eyes of a resourceful teen-ager who's determined to make the best of things in the worst of times.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny and sad., March 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: West Beirut [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This is a great movie for anyone who has lived in Lebanon at the start of the civil war in 1975. The movie depictes the times and mood of Beirut in 1975 very well. The movie accurately depicts the Lebanese youth, their sense of humour, and unrelentless desire to live, and have fun. However this is a sad movie. This is a movie about war, people, and survival. The consequences that war has on the youth is also well depicted. Yes kids were happy that school was shut for a day, a week, a month at times, but the future was uncertain to them, their dreams were shattered, and they began to feel these consequences as the war progressed.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Innocense lost and real life sadness, August 10, 2003

By 

Ammar Al-Sagban (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: West Beirut [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This movie was amazing and when I watched it back in 1999, it really moved me. Eversince then I had begun to appreciate movies as forms of communication and not just hollywood entertainment. It was raw and real. As a Kiwi-Arab, I truly can relate to this, and recommend to all estranged Arabs as well as anyone interested in Arab society. i am only sad that I can't find anymore movies he had directed.