YARA ****

Filmed in the almost unbearably beautiful mountains of Lebanon, "Yara" is one of the most beguiling films you will see in a month of Sundays, setting out a way of life that might seem as remote as the place where director Abbas Fahdel chose to film it. Yara herself is a young girl who lives in the mountains with her aged grandmother. One day a handsome young man chances by and she is smitten but this is no conventional love story; indeed it's hardly a love story at all but an almost documentary-like account of a region and its people, (all the actors are non-professionals, essentially playing themselves), making do with what many of us might think of as very little yet living in what many of us might think of as a kind of paradise. This is one of the greatest of all films to deal with our place in the natural world, reminding us that great cinema need not necessarily announce itself with fanfares but with the quietude and simplicity of the gentlest of breezes.