Yalla, Baba!

In 1980, 32-year-old Mansour traveled to Belgium with his friends, bought cars, and embarked on a road trip back to Lebanon, a country already tired from five years of an eventual 15-year-civil war.

Today, Mansour (74) is a retired geo-historian, lives in Beirut and has not traveled ever since. After his daughter Angie (34) moved to Belgium, strong memories of his adventurous trip have reawakened. Angie invites her father to go on the same journey he once did. 

The path, once taken by Mansour, is no longer the same. On the 4,000 kilometers once crossed, countries have disappeared and others were born. Some borders have faded, others have emerged. Dictatorships have risen and fallen. Wars were extinguished and others broke out causing deaths, destruction and immense displacement. And Lebanon, caught between the sea and two conflicts, is no longer accessible by land. 

The journey of rediscovering the distance between Europe and Lebanon becomes an intimate discovery of the new father-daughter relationship beyond the borders of the traditional family context they are usually framed in.