After a successful festival run, Lebanese anthology feature Disorder is heading to commercial cinemas. MENA distributor Front Row Filmed Entertainment, in partnership with Sony distributor Empire Entertainment, has announced that the film will open in theatres across Lebanon on 10 July, with a wider rollout planned across the Levant, the Gulf, parts of Europe and Australia over the summer.
Executive produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nadine Labaki, Disorder weaves together multiple stories set against the backdrop of a country grappling with economic collapse, political paralysis and lingering trauma. The film premiered at Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival, where it won the Cinema for Humanity Audience Award and sold out three screenings — an early sign that it speaks to more than just cinephiles.
From there, Disorder travelled to venues including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and festivals in Zurich and Washington, D.C., where audiences responded to its mix of intimate storytelling and structural experimentation. Front Row’s strategy now is to convert that festival buzz into ticket sales, relying on a growing regional appetite for independent Arab cinema that tackles real-life crises rather than escaping them.
For Lebanese filmmakers, the release offers a rare piece of good news in a sector battered by funding gaps, currency devaluation and damaged infrastructure. It also reinforces Labaki’s role not just as a director in her own right, but as a patron and amplifier of new voices using cinema to document the country’s “disorder” from the inside.
If audiences show up in numbers, Disorder may help convince distributors and exhibitors that serious, locally rooted stories can hold their own alongside imported blockbusters — and that Lebanon’s film industry, though fragile, still has something urgent to say.
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