Incendies (2010) on Netflix
After Nawal Marwan dies, her will sends twins Jeanne and Simon to find a father they thought dead and a brother they never knew. Jeanne travels to the Middle East; Simon hesitates.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb8.3/10259,490 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
Following the death of Nawal Marwan, an immigrant in Canada, her twin children Jeanne and Simon Marwan sit with Jean Lebel, the notary who employed her for years. Nawal's will leaves two letters. One goes to the father the twins assumed was gone, somewhere in the Levant; the other goes to a brother they did not know existed. Until both are delivered, Nawal refuses a gravestone. Jeanne, a mathematician, agrees and travels to her mother's homeland, where a civil war shaped the country and the people who knew Nawal will not talk about her. Simon, whose relationship with his mother was hard, wants no part of it, and Jeanne asks him to come.
Cast
- Frédéric Paquetas Médecin a l'urgence
- Ahmad Massadas Bassem Marwan
- Lara Atallaas Angry Woman
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Incendies (2010)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Denis Villeneuve considered using two or three actresses to play Nawal because the story spans four decades, but cast Lubna Azabal after being struck by her face in Paradise Now; though Azabal was 30, Villeneuve thought she looked 18 and could play the part throughout with makeup.
- In adapting Wajdi Mouawad's play, Denis Villeneuve kept the story structure and characters but replaced all the dialogue, and even envisioned a silent film before abandoning the idea because of the cost. He showed Mouawad completed scenes to win over the initially reluctant playwright and spent five years on the screenplay while directing two other films.
- The story draws on the life of Souha Bechara and on events of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1990, though the filmmakers attempted to make the location of the plot ambiguous.
- Some of the Jordan shoot took place in Amman, where art director André-Line Beauparlant recreated Beirut by building up rock and debris on a street in the city.
- Two Radiohead songs from Amnesiac, "You and Whose Army?" and "Like Spinning Plates", appear in the film, and Denis Villeneuve said he wrote "You and Whose Army?" into the script from the start to make clear the film was a westerner's point of view about that world.
- For the Jordan scenes, Denis Villeneuve used a Lebanese and Iraqi crew, fearing the war scenes would be too reminiscent of bad experiences for them, but the Arab crew members felt it was important that such stories were on screen.
- To date it is the only film to have won both the Toronto International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film and the Vancouver International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film.
- Denis Villeneuve became the first Canadian filmmaker to win the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award twice in a row, taking it in 2009 for Polytechnique along with Incendies.
