SPOTLIGHT AWARD - Cinema Eye Honors | ALBERT MAYSLES AWARD - Tribeca Film Festival | BEST FIRST FEATURE - Sheffield DocFest | BEST DOCUMENTARY - New Orleans Film Festival
Religion and Spirituality • Islam • Muslim Women • Intergenerational Trauma • Cults • Spiritual Abuse • SWANA Region • MENA Region • Middle East • Women's Rights
Date of Completion: 2023 | Run Time: 93 minutes | Language: Arabic & English with English subtitles | Captions: Yes | Includes: Transcript | Director: Jude Chehab | Producers: Jude Chehab & Fahd Ahmed
Where do we draw the line between love and devotion? An intimate and haunting portrayal of a quest for love and acceptance at any cost, Q depicts the insidious influence of a secretive matriarchal religious order in Lebanon on three generations of women in the Chehab family. Filmmaker Jude Chehab potently documents the unspoken ties and consequences of loyalty that have bonded her mother, grandmother, and herself to the mysterious organization. A masterful portrait of the toll that decades of unrequited love, lost hope, abuse, and despair takes on a person, Q is a multigenerational tale of the eternal search for meaning. A love story of a different kind, this documentary delicately portrays the complexities of unseen power that intermesh the lives of those who love a woman whose heart is in the hands of someone else.
AWARDS
Spotlight Award | Cinema Eye Honors
Albert Maysles Award | Tribeca Film Festival
Best First Feature | Sheffield DocFest
Best Documentary | New Orleans Film Festival
Director & Producer for Q
Jude Chehab is an award-winning Lebanese-American filmmaker whose cinematic interests have drawn her to the exploration of the esoteric, the spiritual and the unspoken. A richly layered visual and intimate personal shooting style developed under the mentorship of Abbas Kiarostami’s final student group; Jude has been credited in collaborations with the BBC, Hot Docs, Refinery29, and Sesame Workshop. Her work has been awarded fellowships through: CAAM, BGDM, Points North Institute, Firelight Media and Chicken & Egg. Her work has shown at the Museum of the Moving Image, Wexner Center, Stanford University, Bozar (Brussels), amongst others. Jude’s first feature documentary, Q, was named one of the best documentaries of 2023 by Vogue Magazine. It was supported by: IDA, ITVS, TFI, and the Sundance Institute and won the Albert Maysles award for Best New Documentary Director at Tribeca and the Grand Jury Award for Best First Feature at Sheffield DocFest. The film won a Cinema Eye Honor and was nominated for two IDA awards. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, part of DOCNYC's '40 under 40' list and Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.