Deadlines

Based on real events, Deadlines is a surreal, harrowing, sometimes darkly comic thriller set in wartime Beirut. Alex Randal (Stephen Moyer), a young reporter with far more bravado than experience, arrives in 1983 in the war-torn city to cover the deadly double bombing of America’s US Marine barracks and France’s paratroop base. In the mayhem, he meets Julia Muller (Anne Parillaud), a beautiful, enigmatic photographer. Like Beirut itself, nothing about Julia is what it seems. Alluring and wildly self-destructive, Julia feeds Alex a tip on a story that, in his eagerness, he runs after only a cursory check. The story, revealing that a murdered Lebanese Army captain was in fact an Israeli spy, puts him on the front page of newspapers around the world. The former war reporters Lerner and Boeken shot their film without extra lighting and often from the shoulder in the working-class district of Tunis, which they magically converted with their Tunisian production designer into a convincing city of Beirut. Just how dangerous war reporting can be is apparent from the dozens of journalists who died in Iraq in 2003. Just how difficult it is to decide what is true in conditions like this is the urgent subject of Deadlines – that was aptly set at the time of the first suicide attacks against the Americans.