Even though you change your country, habits and compatriots to leave behind your culture and your roots, don’t they cling to you forever like a sticky baklava?
The clash of cultures as told through the story of Houwayda, who has embraced a western lifestyle, and her sister Joëlle, who even as an immigrant has remained profoundly Lebanese. The Sticky Side of Baklava is a tender comedy of manners, brimming with laughs, imbroglios and paradoxes, and inhabited by a cast of Québeckers and Lebanese who are as annoying as they are endearing. Like Pierre, Houwayda’s bobo husband, who secretly hopes that his wife will not try to liberate herself further from the traditional values she believes she has left behind. A biting and affectionate portrait of Montréal’s Lebanese community, and of Québec.
With its humorous treatment of the culture clash of immigration,
The Sticky Side of Baklava is a heartwarming film that seeks to bring people together by embracing our differences.
Who would you be today if, a few years ago, you had not chosen the path you took? Another person, in another life. Completely, definitely, irrevocably.
Lea is a renowned neurosurgeon in her fifties, living in Quebec. Layla is a dressmaker of repute in her fifties, living in a remote village in Lebanon.
One day, both start to have memory failures. Each one in her own way goes back in time to a certain night in November. What happened that night? What are they to each other? And who is that woman who resurfaces from the past and whom both women seem to have known?
Marie, a Montreal publisher specializing in memoirs by war survivors, receives an anonymous document, the condensed story of Ali, a young Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Intrigued, Marie begins a search for the author’s identity. She enlists the help of Joseph, a Lebanese man who is painting her office. A strange relationship develops between the pair, who are from very different backgrounds. Then Joseph suddenly disappears. Torn apart by her difficult mission, Marie starts a journey into the past. In a small Lebanese village, in the heart of a bloodstained culture whose unspoken issues are infinitely enigmatic, Marie will eventually find the key to every mystery.
Because she suffocates under rigid traditions and social constraints, Sana decides to leave her daughter and her country, Lebanon. She immigrates to Canada where she wants to forget her roots and her past. Yet, 15 years later, when her daughter finds her, this reunion releases repressed feelings: guilt, suffering, bitterness and an unexpected nostalgia.
Beyond the mother-daughter relationship, this story offers a reflection on the sole and exclusive role assigned to a woman within the Middle-Eastern society, the one of a mother.
Even though you change your country, habits and compatriots to leave behind your culture and your roots, don’t they cling to you forever like a sticky baklava?
The clash of cultures as told through the story of Houwayda, who has embraced a western lifestyle, and her sister Joëlle, who even as an immigrant has remained profoundly Lebanese. The Sticky Side of Baklava is a tender comedy of manners, brimming with laughs, imbroglios and paradoxes, and inhabited by a cast of Québeckers and Lebanese who are as annoying as they are endearing. Like Pierre, Houwayda’s bobo husband, who secretly hopes that his wife will not try to liberate herself further from the traditional values she believes she has left behind. A biting and affectionate portrait of Montréal’s Lebanese community, and of Québec.
With its humorous treatment of the culture clash of immigration,
The Sticky Side of Baklava
is a heartwarming film that seeks to bring people together by embracing our differences.
Who would you be today if, a few years ago, you had not chosen the path you took? Another person, in another life. Completely, definitely, irrevocably.
Lea is a renowned neurosurgeon in her fifties, living in Quebec. Layla is a dressmaker of repute in her fifties, living in a remote village in Lebanon.
One day, both start to have memory failures. Each one in her own way goes back in time to a certain night in November. What happened that night? What are they to each other? And who is that woman who resurfaces from the past and whom both women seem to have known?
Marie, a Montreal publisher specializing in memoirs by war survivors, receives an anonymous document, the condensed story of Ali, a young Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Intrigued, Marie begins a search for the author’s identity. She enlists the help of Joseph, a Lebanese man who is painting her office. A strange relationship develops between the pair, who are from very different backgrounds. Then Joseph suddenly disappears. Torn apart by her difficult mission, Marie starts a journey into the past. In a small Lebanese village, in the heart of a bloodstained culture whose unspoken issues are infinitely enigmatic, Marie will eventually find the key to every mystery.
Because she suffocates under rigid traditions and social constraints, Sana decides to leave her daughter and her country, Lebanon. She immigrates to Canada where she wants to forget her roots and her past. Yet, 15 years later, when her daughter finds her, this reunion releases repressed feelings: guilt, suffering, bitterness and an unexpected nostalgia.
Beyond the mother-daughter relationship, this story offers a reflection on the sole and exclusive role assigned to a woman within the Middle-Eastern society, the one of a mother.