Stephen Gerard Kelly On Why He Has “Zero” Interest In “Disheartening” Awards Campaigns For His Double Oscar Contender ‘The Shadow of Beirut’ & How Hillary Clinton Came On Board As Exec Producer — Red Sea Studio

For In The Shadow of Beirut, first-time filmmaker Stephen Gerard Kelly spent five years living among the film’s four featured families in the Sabra and Shatila neighborhoods outside Beirut as it became engulfed in economic and political crisis following a 1982 massacre. 

“I never set out to make a film. I arrived in Beirut in 2015. I bought a bicycle and started to ride around the different parts of the city. After a few weeks, I came into Sabra, one of the neighborhoods in the film, and by luck, I became friends with somebody there who brought me into his family,” co-director Kelly told Deadline at our studio at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival where the doc screens this evening.

“He was a Palestinian gentleman whose mother fled Naka in 1948 and settled in Shatila. Just by her, being the matriarch, she brought me in probably feeling sorry for me not knowing any Arabic then and being new to the city.”

Kelly added that he started documenting what he had been witnessing after his command of Arabic grew, allowing him to develop a sense of mutual trust within the community. 

“In 2018, people started to ask me during times of celebration and hardship to film things. Be it a childbirth, a wedding, or challenges in the neighborhood,” he said.

Screen Ireland and ZDF/Arte financed the pic, which had its world premiere in June at the Doc Edge Festival in New Zealand. Producers on the pic include Brendan J. Byrne, Myriam Sassine, and the Belfast-based Cyprus Avenue Films (Gaza, Bobby Sands: 66 Days). Production partners include Beirut’s Abbout Productions (Costa Brava, Lebanon), Republic of Ireland-based Real Films (Gaza), and Berlin-based Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion (The Cleaners). Executive producers are, curiously, former First Lady Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea Clinton, and Siobhan Sinnerton of HiddenLight Productions. 

Kelly said the Clintons were very much a late edition to the Shadow of Beirut team and played very little part in its creation beyond financing. 

“We were in an advanced stage of post, and we’d spent the budget we had, which came from Screen Ireland, ZDF, and Arte. We reached a roadblock, and Brendan Byrne was colleagues with Siobhan Sinnerton, who I know from working on For Sama, which was a beautiful wartime film from Syria,” Kelly said. 

“When Siobhan showed an interest in coming on board through HiddenLight, we spoke as a team, and we decided it was better to take a very modest sum of money from HiddenLight to finish the film rather than waiting and looking for funding.” 

He added: “Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton’s names are down there as executive producers, but the real person who helped was Siobhan Sinnerton. There was no editorial influence of the Clintons on the film.” 

The pic is Ireland’s entry in the Best International Feature category at the 2024 Oscars. When asked whether he was interested in Oscars campaigning, Kelly said: “Zero. Absolutely zero.” 

“Oscar campaigning, I’m learning, is disheartening and all about money and who has the biggest budget,” he said. “I’m new in this world. I’d like to stay in it from a documentary filmmaking perspective, but are awards something I’m interested in? Not in the slightest.”

Check out the full video interview with Kelly above.

Red Sea runs until Nov 9.