While attending Tribeca Film Festival this year, one of the short film highlights was Nay Tabbara’s Ebb & Flow. It finds two friends, Loulwa (Dona Atallah) and Jana (Aya Zeaiter), going through a typical day of teenage rebellion and young love, all while grappling with the instability in Lebanon during the early aughts. Atallah shines as the primary character, encapsulating the relatable youthful experience of wanting to appear older and fit in at school. The short was inspired by the director’s own experience growing up in Lebanon. 

As for Tabbara’s previous work, her Frayed Roots short premiered at Raindance in 2020. She teaches editing as an Adjunct Professor at New York University, where she graduated with an MFA in filmmaking. 

Lexi Lane: Hi Nay! So, Ebb & Flow, to start off, it played at Tribeca. How was your experience getting to see it play and in general at the festival this year? 
Nay Tabbara: It was a great experience, honestly. I think it’s a dream to have the film screen at the top theaters in New York, like premiering at Village East and then getting to AMC on 19th. We would have never expected for that to happen. The people that we met, the filmmakers that we were screening with, the block was great. The programmers were so kind and helpful throughout the entire process. I’m so glad and grateful that this was the premiere experience that we had. When it first screened, I was just worried it wasn’t loud enough, especially for the explosion moment. Apparently, I didn’t know, but when you have very high adrenaline, you don’t hear things has clearly as they actually are. 

Lexi Lane: Had you done anything else with Tribeca before this? 
Nay Tabbara: Not really, no. I graduated from NYU from the grad film program, so [they do] have a good relationship with Tribeca. I think a lot of students end up going and premiering their films there, but that was my first interaction with Tribeca and my first connection to the programmers. 

Lexi Lane: I do want to talk a little bit about the film’s origin. I watched another interview you did from Tribeca where you mentioned that the short took a little bit of time to come together, mainly with the funding. When did you first write and then ultimately film the project? 
Nay Tabbara: I started writing the film Fall 2019. Going through the NYU program, we had finished all the other projects and that was going to be my thesis. I’m like, ‘Okay, I need to sit down and come up with ideas.’ I was very blocked. I couldn’t write for a while. And then, the revolution broke out in Lebanon in October 2019. I would usually be the person who’s on the streets protesting and holding banners, but I was very far from Lebanon and I couldn’t be back home. It was a little paralyzing for me, where I felt like my body was in the wrong place. I also felt guilty for being so far away from Lebanon. It’s great when you see something break out, like a revolution with people asking for what we’ve always been asking for growing up in that country. It’s so fulfilling, but it’s also scary. It’s like, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be a change.’ That inevitably made me scared for my parents and my sister and my niece. How’s my niece going to grow up in a time like this? The only way that I could actually express myself was just through journaling and writing.

All of those worries are not very far from the worries that we had growing up also in Lebanon, because it’s kind of a cyclical experience. My parents went through the Civil War. We went through excessive bombings and political assassinations. Now, the political collapse and the crisis. It just kind of brought me to realize that this is, in a sense, a standard in our experience, where something big happens and you fear for what’s next. I just started to write. These emotions, I realized it was the first time that I understood what my parents felt when we were growing up. As an adult, now I can see what the experience was for them. When I started writing, I remembered that the first moment that I saw my parents kind of break in the face of all of that, when they felt like, ‘Okay, this is becoming dangerous.’ It was a political assassination that took place, and I just wrote a script based on that moment. 

My best friend then came over and we were hanging out at my house. It was, I think, a Friday afternoon. I could hear the news and hear how horrified my parents were. We ran to the living space, and we saw that. That was definitely a shifting moment in my life. This is how the script originally started. It was the story of that one specific moment. Then, when I let it be the script, not just directly a personal experience, I started to write it more and tried to collect from all the different experiences that we’ve had. There was that one moment, but there were so many other instances where something happened, and we can’t go to school for about a week afterwards. Things get interrupted, but then you just go back to school and everything’s normal. You’re a kid. You don’t understand necessarily the level of horror that’s taking place around you. 

In August 2020, the explosion happened in Beirut. It wasn’t fiction for me anymore. It was reality. It was hard in that moment to see the importance of actually writing that script. I think I took a month or two away from it. As a Lebanese being here and talking to people who have no idea what happened in the region, they’re like, ‘Oh, this explosion that always happens over there.’ It was actually much bigger for us, and it was a horrifying thing that almost destroyed the entire city. I want to show the humanity behind what’s happening. I kept writing and we started to apply for grants. 

Lexi Lane: With Ebb & Flow, did you view it as a sense of not only protest to make the film, but also sort of an educational factor? 
Nay Tabbara: I hope it can be. I think making the film originally was more a need for me to protest and express myself. A need to also relive those moments and make a bit of sense out of them. I had a lot of people at Tribeca come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I saw a teenager that was growing up the exact same way as I did in Boston,’ or somewhere else. I think this is, for me, the biggest compliment. Then, add to it the layer of instability. It just created a connection between the character and the audience. 

Lexi Lane: I do want to talk a little bit about the dynamic between Loulwa and Jana, given that she sort of has this push-and-pull with the seemingly older, more experienced Jana. How would you describe the relationship they have? 
Nay Tabbara: They’re definitely opposites that complement each other. Jana is the more mature or experienced person, in a sense, but it is a bit of a facade. Loulwa comes across as not very experienced, but more responsible. If Loulwa is not willing to take a risk, Jana will. But Jana doesn’t know how to live with the consequences. I always imagined them as two best friends that have always been since they were kids. Your friends that you meet at a very early age, they become your family. They are your sense of safety. I really enjoyed even just seeing them come to life with the actresses and seeing how that shift happens, like Loulwa being the follower and then the leader. 

Lexi Lane: Something I noticed in general is there’s this notion, in general and also in the film, to try to appear older as a teenager. 
Nay Tabbara: We were all trying to look much older when we were adolescents. Back then, you’re like, ‘No, I am an adult. I am responsible enough to take care of my own things.’ It’s also a very private process where you’re not going to do it in front of your family. I think maybe it’s a way of taking control over our lives. You want to go off after school and you want to look the part. 

Lexi Lane: Speaking of the looks in the film, can you speak a little about what the decision process was like to capture the early 2000s? 
Nay Tabbara: It was very important to us to make it as authentic as possible. We had a lookbook that we were building off of. We’re going for poppy colors. We’re going for [a] vibrant, lively world. We definitely had a lot of references from the early 2000s, looking up posters and all of those things. There was an interesting conversation too, which is the tools we have to show that period of time: cell phones, cars, and clothes. Everything else is pretty much the same. My dad somehow stored our own phones. The phone that Jana had, [it] used to be mine when I was 12. It doesn’t show in the film, but we have an iPod that I used to take around all the time. The clothes got a little trickier because fashion is very cyclical. 

There was something about making it a little bit timeless. If you see a scene without their phones, I don’t think you would necessarily place it in that time. 

Lexi Lane: You mentioned the iPod, but were there any other scenes that didn’t make the final film? 
Nay Tabbara: Not too many. There was a scene when she first walks into the school. She looks to the side and sees her best friend sitting with one of the guys. They smile at each other. She continues down the hallway and sees the boy she has a crush on. That was a scene that I loved. As we were editing, I realized that the first time you see the boy is in her daydream. I had a scene of her overlooking Beirut and you could actually see the lights. The scenes at the end were very differently sequenced. We flipped it around to up the stakes with the parents. 

Lexi Lane: I do want to talk about Loulwa having her first kiss with Sharif, when things get tense when he starts to be a bit more aggressive right before another bombing. I’m curious how you would classify him as a character? He does sort of have some political differences between the other characters. 
Nay Tabbara: I think Sharif is the epitome of the teenager who thinks he knows everything. Very mature, but still has a lot of room to grow. The way that he speaks about politics, this is how we used to speak when we were kids. But that’s just because this is what we heard our parents say. It’s not because we believed in the politics or understood. I don’t think any of the characters are at an age where they’re doing any reflection or reading. He’s very confident, but that’s just because how he’s brought up. 

He takes it a little too far. For me, in that moment, he is a 16-year-old who hasn’t been taught about consent. He’s a teenager who found himself with a girl who’s down to kiss him. I don’t think it was, ‘Oh, he intentionally wanted to do that to her.’ There’s always a conversation of who’s more experienced than the other person. I felt it was authentic to the characters and to the moment. There’s also something a little bittersweet, which is something that’s horrible is saving you from something else. 

Lexi Lane: I did see that Sami who plays Sharif came from a music background. How did the casting take place? 
Nay Tabbara: He’s done a bit of acting. He was also studying engineering, if I’m not mistaken, when we were shooting. He is now doing his Master’s in like science or music or something like that. But they’re actually real-life partners. Sami is Dona’s partner. She was so perfect for the role. It’s a lot of finding the right dynamic with the person to do such an intimate scene together, even if it’s not very high intimacy. I really wanted her to be very comfortable in that. The chemistry between them was great, but I was a little skeptical at first. It wouldn’t be great to cast a real couple to do that. You want to separate your actors from real life. As we kept going and did test runs, he’s the person that Dona was the most comfortable with. 

Lexi Lane: How do you consider Loulwa’s dynamic with her family? 
Nay Tabbara: The mom and daughter are relieved that the other person’s alive, but the mom’s very angry at what happened. Loulwa is very ashamed. In moments like these, I think there isn’t much to be said. There is another part of her that is very grateful that her kid is alive. She needs to teach her kid a lesson, but [Loulwa] just went through a lot. Where do you find that balance? Maybe that is taking her phone at the end and proving the hierarchy. 
There’s a lot of anxiety we see from the mom in the beginning. That kind of translates to this is probably a defense mechanism. She realizes that there’s no control she can have. Loulwa doesn’t have anything to say other than ‘I’m sorry.’