Meet the Bardi family — father Walid (played by Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri), mother Soraya (Nadine Labaki) once a well-known singer, and their two daughters, teenage Tala (Nadia Charbel) and younger Rim (played by twins Ceana and Geana Restom). They have left the pollution and chaos of Beirut for the mountains where they have built an isolated home and live with Walid’s plain-speaking mother. Their idyllic life is threatened when plans for a landfill site next door are announced and the engineers and workers come rolling in. The rubbish that now appears on their doorstep brings in all the aspects of life in Beirut they had sought to leave behind but also tellingly creates a new schism in the family as it becomes increasingly clear that all is not well in the Badri marriage. 

Co-written by Clara Roquet (Rosales’s screenwriter and director of Libertad) and co-edited by Carles Marqués-Marcet — 10,00km (2014), Els dies que vindran/The Days to Come (2019) —Costa Brava, Lebanon conjures a strong sense of a society on the brink of collapse. Its two child protagonists — from the quick tongued Rim with an answer for everything and much in common with the feisty child protagonists of Spanish cinema, to her elder sister Tala who is dealing with the turmoil of adolescence — tellingly ground a film where different generations are forced to examine exactly what family means when the going gets tough.