The In Between

As he prepares for a casting, he stumbles upon a childhood photo in which he doesn’t recognize himself. This simple incident revives a deep dissonance between his dreams and reality.
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After fleeing a crisis-stricken Lebanon, he had promised himself to rebuild his life and fulfill his dreams in Paris. But one day, as he prepares for a casting, he stumbles upon a childhood photo in which he doesn’t recognize himself. This simple incident haunts him throughout the day: it revives a deep dissonance between his memories and his present, between the life he had envisioned and the one that seems to have been forced upon him.

Director, Screenwriter, Producer & editor Samer Nouh
Image XIAOQIANG ZOU
Cast MARCO VAGUE, ROXANNE DIF
VO NOE CASTANIER
Sound MAHER ROUX
COLORIST AXEL BOUTHE

Minutes

2025

Release

Production

France

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Bio – Filmography

Born on May 13, 1991, in Lebanon, Samer Nouh moved to Paris in 2016 to pursue film studies at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Having grown up in a village perched in the hills of Lebanon and witnessed the ongoing migrations of its inhabitants—as well as his own departure—the artist weaves these displacements into his work. Sometimes they are physical movements; other times, they are desires that awaken and pull individuals away from those around them, leading to a sense of alienation. In Un Après-midi sous la neige (Novel – Tropismes Editions, 2023), as in The In-Between (Short film, 2025), Tender Things (Video – 2020), News From Beirut (Short film, 2017), and In the Details (Short film, 2013), Samer Nouh seeks to portray a place—an imperfect home—where the prevailing feeling is one of being out of sync with one’s surroundings.
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DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Through this film, I want to explore the dissonance that arises when one is torn between two places. Without dwelling on the character’s details, I aim to make them the embodiment of an emotion rather than a realistic portrait. My character, uprooted from a crisis-stricken Lebanon, clings to Paris as a space for renewal—a place where he hopes to reinvent himself and achieve his ambitions. Yet the discovery of a simple photograph shatters this illusion and confronts him with a dizzying question: who is he, really?
This story continues my ongoing work on how displacement shapes identity. Like my previous short films and my fiction writing, I seek here to examine how the past influences our paths, and how exile never fully erases what we’ve fled. The direction is minimalist, aiming above all to evoke emotion rather than depict an objective reality.
More than a story about migration, this film is a dive into the identity vertigo of a man torn between the image of himself he projects and the one he carries within, between the dream of a new life and the persistent echo of what he left behind. Let me know if you’d like this adapted for a film pitch, grant application, or artistic statement.