‘Anxious in Beirut’ examines the capital city of Lebanon in the context of various political abuses directed at its citizens, a setting where the generation after the Civil War is trying to tell its story. Director Zakaria Jaber captures, much in the manner of a diary, the oppressive atmosphere surrounding the tragedies of his hometown. Beirut is on its knees, having become a place of anxiety and insecurity for the director’s family and friends, and by extension for all the inhabitants of the city. In recent history, this land has witnessed revolution, demonstrations, manifestations, activist movements, explosions, a pandemic, and corruption of the political system; the director's view on this amalgam of misfortunes becomes an extension of his generation’s, a generation waiting, in suspension, for a miracle. In his desire to understand the relationship between an inner and an outer world, the filmmaker presents a story of contrasts, between the general and the personal, the public and the private, the old and the young, death and emigration, the free and the captive, the resilient and the desperate, drawing on a detailed perspective on certain historical events that we, as Europeans, know perhaps only superficially. Ultimately, the filmmaker's endeavor seeks to bring us to a point of awareness: when the young generation's catchphrase is “a plane or a coffin", how can one not be anxious in Beirut? (Carmen Lascoiu)