Based on award winning novel by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi.

A Girl Made of Dust is a film of universal appeal about a ten year-old girl determined to rescue her father from depression as the war in Lebanon engulfs her. Adapted by screenwriters Monica Solon (Brazilian) and Steve Hawes (Anglo-French) in collaboration with the Lebanese author Nathalie Abi-Ezzi, from whose novel it is drawn, the script also has director Wafa'a Halawi (Lebanese/French), Basil Khalil (British/Israeli/Palestinian) and Nadine Mourad (Brazilian/Lebanese) as its producers.

This multi-cultural team, brought together by the Blake Friedmann Film, Television and Literary agency in London, provides a valuable contribution towards the richness of this filmmaking experience: a beautiful story set in the Middle East with a true potential to resonate in the hearts of international audiences.

Our determination to make this film stems from the realisation that it is ultimately optimistic: it dramatises an assertion of humanity in the eye of a storm of barbarism. The adaptation also seeks to play out the subversive humour of the novel from which it is drawn, in which human relations are depicted teetering between amusement and exasperation as much as anguish in the midst of historic tragedy.

The film aims to emphasize the sequence of powerful and detailed aural and visual images, through which the world reveals itself to Ruba: the click of her father’s worry-beads, her grandmother’s mischievous smile, her uncle’s slick hair and shiny, soundless car, a masked man’s manic laughter, the ever approaching sound of shelling, the Israeli gunship so close she can see the pilot’s blue eyes, quarrels overheard, her brother’s broken body, her father shaking with silent tears… all intensifying to the film’s climax, in which a man braves the falling shells and learns to face the world again.