The Swing

After sixty years of marriage, Antoine and Viviane have lost their most beloved daughter. But no one has told Antoine — bedridden, ninety years old, his heart operating at a quarter of its capacity. The family makes a quiet, collective decision: to protect him from the pain, to let him believe she is simply travelling abroad, and to keep smiling.

In doing so, they trap themselves in a shared grief with nowhere to go — forced to swallow their mourning, to perform normalcy, and to hold together a loving fiction for the man at the centre of their world. Shot with remarkable intimacy over the final chapter of a couple's life together, The Swing is at once a deeply personal family portrait and a meditation on truth, love, denial, and the cost of protecting those we love.

Filmed over the final days of his own grandparents' lives, director Cyril Aris had incomparable access to a story that is at once utterly specific and profoundly universal. The result is a work that never feels constructed — only witnessed. The camera moves quietly through a Beirut apartment where the outside world barely intrudes, and yet everything — war, memory, a city's collective trauma — is somehow present.

Beyond the intimacy of one family, The Swing holds up a mirror to Lebanese society — a country that has long lived in a self-imposed denial of its own grief, rebuilding with shiny towers while burying the stigmata of a bloody civil war. The white lie told to a dying patriarch becomes an allegory for a nation's impossible relationship with loss.

The film raises questions that linger long after the final frame: What do we owe to the dying? What do we do with grief we cannot share? And what remains of a life — of a love — once the body begins to fade?

• El-Gouna Bronze Star Award – 2nd El-Gouna Film Festival, Egypt 2018
• Jury Prize – 24th MedFilm Festival, Rome, Italy 2018
• Jury Prize – 2nd Manarat Film Festival, Tunisia 2019
• Honorable Mention – 8th Open City Documentary Festival, London, UK 2018 — "Impeccable judged framing and profoundly touching meditation on mortality and morality"
• Special Mention – 5th Budapest International Documentary Festival, Hungary 2019
• Recipient – AFAC Documentary Grant

53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Czech Republic 2018 | World Premiere
8th Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, UK 2018 | Closing Night Film, UK Premiere
2nd El-Gouna Film Festival, Egypt 2018 | MENA Premiere
40th Cinemed, Festival International du Cinéma Méditerranéen de Montpellier, France 2018 | French Premiere
12th Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2018 | In Competition
43rd Atlanta Film Festival, USA 2019 | US Premiere
25th Minsk International Film Festival – Listapad, Belarus 2018
24th MedFilm Festival, Rome, Italy 2018
5th Budapest International Documentary Film Festival, Hungary 2018
20th Black Movie, Geneva International Independent Film Festival, Switzerland 2019
10th ALFILM – Arab Film Festival, Berlin, Germany 2019
2nd Documentary Convention, Leipzig, Germany 2019
ANA Contemporary Arab Cinema, BAM New York 2019
18th Istanbul Independent Film Festival, Turkey 2019
3rd Cairo Cinema Days, Egypt 2019
2nd Manarat Film Festival, Tunisia 2019
Royal Film Commission of Jordan – Special Screening, Jordan 2019
6th Sudan Independent Film Festival, Sudan 2019
4th Haifa Independent Film Festival 2019
10th Beirut Cinema Days, Lebanon 2019 | Lebanese Premiere

The Hollywood Reporter — "Intimate and moving... a meditation on truth, love and lies in the face of illness and death." — Boyd Van Hoeij

Eye for Film — "Aris is observant and adept at balancing emotions. [The Swing] offers a window to big ideas of morality and mortality that will resonate with families everywhere."

Take One Cinema — "An intensely intimate piece... balances an unusual aesthetic with a poignant meditation on grief and old age. The Swing marks Aris as a filmmaker to anticipate in the future." — Luka Vukos

The Daily Star (Lebanon) — "Aris' award-winning 'The Swing' is a unique examination of grief, loneliness." — Jim Quilty

fred.fm — "The mix of personal story and universality is fascinating, as is the private drama which subtly unfolds throughout the film and the themes of memory, loss, aging and more that it deals with."

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