ELEKTRA

ELEKTRA

Feature Film Released in 2023

Set in the ruins of Beirut’s historic Piccadilly Theater after decades of war, Elektra traces three days in the life of a playwright and her troupe of actors attempting to stage Sophocles’ classic tragedy. As they seek to revive the ghostly space, the playwright is confronted with a web of deceit, envy, and conspiracy that culminates in her murder.

Beginning with themes of divine justice and revenge, the film exposes the psychological toll of a withered city built on a libido of power. The characters undergo a total breakdown, becoming ghosts themselves within the decaying theater—a stark symbol of what has vanished in Lebanon.

METHOD & STRUCTURE

The film unfolds as an unscripted, discontinuous dream-narrative composed of six distinct chapters. Written collaboratively each morning between the director and the cast, the work allowed the actresses to improvise fragmentary, personal stories of love and cruelty within the structural framework of classical antiquity.

Protagonist Diamond Abou Abboud embodies the central writer as well as Clytemnestra, the guilty sister, and the jealous lover—using the role to confront the psychological traumas inflicted by a Beiruti society that masks its internal oppression behind a facade of cosmopolitanism. The four supporting actresses—Manal Issa (Elektra), Flavia Bechara (Orestes), Lisa Debs (Aegisthus), and Reina Jabbour (Chorus)—act as fractured psychological mirrors, reflecting distinct facets of the writer’s inner world.

THE PICCADILLY THEATER

Opened in Beirut in 1966 as a landmark venue for stage productions and cinema, the subterranean Piccadilly Theater served as a safe haven from bombs and snipers during the war—the very venue where the filmmaker first discovered cinema as a child. Later utilized as a refuge by Yasser Arafat during the 1982 invasion, the now-abandoned theater stands as an architectural emblem of Beirut itself: a place once defined by cultural brilliance, now reduced to ruin.

Cast

Stills