Hiam Abbas, who performed Marcia Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” and Tunisian-Egyptian star Hend Sabri (“Four Daughters,” “Finding Ola”) are set to star in “Your Turn, 203,” a social comedy set in a battered Beirut. Abbas performs a housewife named Aida who replies to a casting name for extras to make ends meet.
“Your Turn, 203,” which is a working title, is to be directed by Lebanese filmmaker Cynthia Sawma, making her characteristic movie debut after working as a casting director on main Arab movies, together with Nadine Labaki’s “Capernaum,” and subsequently making a number of award-winning shorts. Lebanon’s Abbout Prods. and France’s Wheelhouse Prods. are lead-producing, with Mohamed Hefzy’s Movie Clinic, Gianluca Chakra’s Entrance Row and Lebanese producer Antoine Khelife additionally on board.
Abbout Prods. chief Georges Schoucair and Sawma shall be in Cannes to satisfy with their manufacturing companions.
The Get together Movie Gross sales shall be dealing with worldwide distribution on the movie.
“Your Turn, 203” is ready in 2023 Beirut when Lebanon is the throes of monetary collapse. Aida and her husband are struggling after he has loses his job as a personal chauffeur. “In addition to the frequent electricity cuts and her growing boredom as a housewife whose kids have left the nest, Aida can now no longer pay the bills,” says the synopsis.
By means of a fortuitous flip of occasions she intersects with Saydeh, performed by Sabry, who works as an additional and helps enroll Aida in a casting company for extras known as Paradise. This, in flip, leads Aida to bond with new girlfriends and push again on her more and more grumpy husband “as she redefines the limits Beirut society had set for her,” the synopsis provides.
“What makes ‘Your Turn, 203’ particularly timely now is that, because of the war, everybody feels like a pawn or that they are playing an extra in their own life,” stated Schoucair, referring to the continuing struggle between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is at present underneath a ceasefire. “But the film is really about the female condition,” he added.
The plan is to shoot “Your Turn, 203” in Beirut in October, in hopes that by then on the very least “the ceasefire will become permanent,” or that the struggle will finish, Schoucair stated.
