Wajdi Mouawad (b. 1971, Beirut) spent his childhood in Lebanon and grew up in France. He studied at the National Stage School in Montreal, where he now lives and works. He writes for newspapers and for the radio, but is mainly involved in the theatre – writing plays for children, young people and adults. He also acts and directs for the stage, and is interested, above all, in works concerning the issues of his native country and its people – war, emigration, difficulties with individual and social integration into a foreign cultural environment. He also wrote Tideline as a play and its adaptation is Mouawad's film debut. Here he finds his own film language, he visualises the romantic notions of the hero, he allows the dead to encounter the living, and condenses the drastic past of certain characters into scenes bordering on expressive stylisation and rawness.
MFF Karlovy Vary
