A scooter gets stolen in Beirut, and a single mother goes looking for it. That’s the whole engine of Arzé, and it’s enough, because the search drags Arzé and her teenage son across a city quietly partitioned by sect. To get help in each neighborhood, she adjusts how she presents herself, leaning on whichever identity will open the door in front of her. A small comedy about a missing moped becomes a map of how a country talks itself into believing its own divisions.
Mira Shaib made that film on purpose, and she made it patiently over the course of ten years.
The Brother Who Mailed Her the Movies
Shaib’s way into film arrived in the mail. Her brother left Lebanon for the United States when she was around eleven and he was eighteen, back before cheap calls and video chat, when staying close across an ocean took real effort. He was a movie buff who shot home videos and music videos of the family, and from abroad he started mailing her DVDs. She would open a package meant for the whole household, clothes and makeup and gifts for her mother and sister, and underneath all of it a box of films just for her. He would call to ask if she had watched this one, what she thought of that one. The movies became the private language between them.
She fell hard. She canceled Sunday plans and faked sick to stay home and watch, disappearing into a film the way other kids disappeared outside. When her brother went to film school, she followed, and they started writing together, trading ideas back and forth. He is Faissal Sam Shaib, co-writer and producer of Arzé alongside Louay Khraish, which means the partnership that began with a mailed DVD now has both their names on a feature. “He’s the one who got me into this whole industry,” she says. Shaib went on to take a film degree in Beirut and then an MFA in Montreal, where she was defending her thesis the week of the interview.
A Quest Built From the Dardennes and De Sica
Ask Shaib about her lineage and she points straight to the Dardenne brothers, especially Two Days, One Night, their 2014 film starring Marion Cotillard as a woman with one weekend to convince her coworkers to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. What pulled Shaib in was the shape of it: a character with an urgent task and almost no time, the camera handheld and close, the running time lean, the world built from suburbs and ordinary people instead of postcards. If they shoot in Paris, she says, you don’t get the pretty version, you get the hoods and the suburbs. Her first short was openly built on that approach, handheld and raw. “Even my first short film was purely inspired by their cinematic approach.”
Behind the Dardennes sits the older model she names without hesitation, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, the 1948 neorealist landmark about a man and his son combing postwar Rome for a stolen bicycle. It’s the root of every story where one small theft cracks open a whole society, and it gave Arzé both its engine and its realism. The lineage isn’t decoration. It’s the reason a stolen scooter can carry a film about sect and family without buckling.
That taste lines up with how she works. She’s drawn to real material, stories of women’s struggles she gathered firsthand over years of NGO work around abuse, women’s empowerment, and child protection. She can’t put those women on camera and expose them, so she does the opposite: she folds many real lives into one invented character. “Arzé is a real human. Layla is a real person. And Kinan is every single Lebanese young person.” The result, she says, is that audiences keep telling her each character feels like a relative, an aunt, a grandmother, a cousin from their own family.
Saying It As It Is
The sensitive part is the sectarianism. Lebanese films, Shaib argues, tend to speak about the country’s divisions while sugarcoating them, out of a real fear of backlash, of being misread, of being canceled. She gets it. She admits she’s nervous about screening the film in Lebanon, unsure whether deeply religious audiences from different backgrounds will laugh with it or walk out feeling mocked. Arzé tries to say it plainly anyway, and the thing that lets it get away with saying it is humor. Comedy puts the divisions on screen without anyone feeling singled out, because the joke lands on everyone equally. Every character mirrors every other character, which is the whole point: we are all the same, all pointing fingers, all dealing with the same problems the same way.
The title does that quiet work too. Arzé is a woman’s name, but it’s also the word for the cedar at the center of the Lebanese flag. She chose it because the cedar means endurance, something that grows old and stays, and because the name itself is neutral. You can’t tell which sect or region an Arzé comes from, which is exactly the point of a film about a country forever trying to sort its people into camps.
Ten Years to a Yes
The making matched the message in its stubbornness. Arzé began as a short in 2015, submitted to the Robert Bosch Stiftung film prize in Germany. It didn’t win the grant, and the note that came back was that this was really a feature. So Shaib spent years pushing it through development labs, Torino Film Lab, Global Media Makers in Los Angeles, the Red Sea Lodge, collecting rejections along the way. Some people told her the film couldn’t be made. Some told her it would start a war. At one grim point she wondered whether the premise would even hold, whether Lebanon might improve enough that the sectarian backdrop would date. It didn’t. A decade on, she says, the situation is the same and worse, which kept the film painfully relevant. They finally shot it in 2022, across more than twenty Beirut locations on a tight schedule.
Some people told us this movie is gonna create a war.
What she learned over that decade was how to listen. The residencies put her in rooms with filmmakers from everywhere, people who would tell her a character wasn’t working, and she had to weigh that against the fact that the film was, in her words, a baby she had grown up with. The structure made it harder: she directs, but there are two writers, so feedback meant first being convinced herself and then going back to convince Faissal and Louay. She also learned how to direct, which she calls her favorite part of the job. Working with established Lebanese actors on a rushed schedule as a first-timer, she leaned on trust over authority, treating the set like a small family where performers brought her ideas and they weighed the pros and cons together. The exception to the professional cast was Bilal Al Hamwi, the non-professional she cast as Kinan because she wanted someone with first-hand experience of the character’s world.
When the Tribeca acceptance finally came, the first thing Shaib did was call her brother. She teared up.
Finally. It feels like your worth has paid off.
After all the years and all the no’s, it landed less as triumph than as relief, the sense that the work would finally be seen and that being a filmmaker was something she was allowed to keep doing.
What’s Next
She isn’t slowing down. She and the writers are already developing the next one, conceived loosely as part of a set, another film named for a woman, another social story rooted in Lebanon, with the synopsis and plot already taking shape. The decade behind her seems to have changed the math. The first yes makes the next film thinkable in a way it wasn’t before. After a ten-year quest for a single scooter, the road no longer looks impossible. “I can write another movie and I can go down that road again.” The full conversation, including the casting stories she tells with real warmth and the moment her voice cracks on the Tribeca call, is worth hearing in full.
