General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Insult (قضية رقم 23)

The Insult (Arabic: قضية رقم 23, "Case No. 23"; French: L'Insulte) is a 2017 Arabic-language courtroom drama directed by Ziad Doueiri and co-written with Joëlle Touma, in which a minor dispute between a Lebanese Christian mechanic and a Palestinian refugee foreman in Beirut escalates into a nationally televised trial that reopens the wounds of Lebanon's civil war (1975–1990).¹^•² A Lebanese-French-Belgian-American co-production, it became the first Lebanese film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Ziad Doueiri; screenplay by Doueiri and Joëlle Touma¹
Year, language, runtime	2017; Arabic; 113 minutes⁴
Lead cast	Adel Karam as Tony Hanna; Kamel El Basha as Yasser Abdallah Salameh⁵
Signature award	Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Venice International Film Festival 2017, for Kamel El Basha⁶
Oscar nomination	Best Foreign Language Film, Academy Awards 2018; Lebanon's first nominee in the category³
Box office	$3,666,268 worldwide, of which $1,001,305 in the United States⁵
Critical scores	86% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (116 reviews); Metascore 72 on Metacritic⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

In present-day Beirut, a construction crew reworks the balcony drainpipe of Tony Hanna (Adel Karam), a Lebanese Christian auto mechanic and a devoted member of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian political party; his wife Shirine (Rita Hayek) is expecting a child.⁹ When Tony finds the Palestinian foreman Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha) repairing the pipe after Tony had refused the work and smashed it, a shouting match follows and Yasser curses him with an insult aimed at his community.⁹^•¹⁰ Tony, hurt in his dignity, files a complaint; Yasser later offers an apology, which Tony rejects, and in a heated exchange Yasser punches him, breaking two of his ribs.¹¹

The case reaches court, where Tony's lawyer is Wajdi Wehbe (Camille Salameh) and the judge is Colette Mansour (Julia Kassar); the media circus surrounding the trial pushes Lebanon toward social unrest and forces both men to confront their own histories and prejudices.¹² The Christian party leader Samir Geagea, played by Rifaat Torbey, appears in a small but significant role.¹²^•¹³ Yasser's own backstory reaches back to 1971, when, as a teenager in a Jordanian refugee camp after the PLO's defeat there, he was provoked by a Jordanian army cook.¹⁴

Origins and production

An autobiographical seed. Doueiri has said the premise came from an incident in his own life: while watering plants in Beirut he exchanged insults with a construction foreman, and, noticing the man's Palestinian accent, hurled "the big one," the same insult Yasser delivers in the film; his then-wife persuaded him to apologize.³ He and Touma, his co-writer and former wife, wrote the script about two years before release; the film waited that long for a producer until the Lebanese producer Antoun Sehnaoui came on board, with further funding from France, Belgium, and the United States.¹⁵

The Lebanese state supported the production, lending the army, police, and riot police for some sequences and providing locations and helicopters.¹⁵ Production companies included Ezekiel Films, Tessalit Productions, Rouge International, Cohen Media Group, and Scope Pictures, with Tommaso Fiorilli as cinematographer, Dominique Marcombe as editor, and Éric Neveux composing the score.⁴

Reception and awards

The film premiered in Official Competition at the 2017 Venice International Film Festival, where Kamel El Basha won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor.⁶ It went on to play Telluride and Toronto, won audience awards at Valladolid, AFI Fest, and the Sydney Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2018 Academy Awards, the first nomination for Lebanon in that category.¹⁶^•¹⁷^•³ In Lebanon it became a box-office hit.¹⁸

Critics generally received it favorably: 86% on the Tomatometer and a Metascore of 72.⁷^•⁸ Reviewers highlighted the line in which Wajdi observes that "No one has a monopoly on suffering," and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised the two lead performances.⁸ A scholarly review in Genocide Studies and Prevention placed the film within the post-1990 corpus of Lebanese cinema asking what it means to be "post-war" in Lebanon.²

Controversy

The film and its director drew political fire from both directions. Although Lebanese officials backed the film, Doueiri was detained at Beirut's international airport in September 2017 and questioned by a military tribunal about his previous film The Attack (2012), which had been shot partly in Tel Aviv with Israeli actors and was banned in Lebanon under laws against relations with Israel.¹⁵^•³ At the same time, The Insult itself was banned in some Arab countries, including Palestine and Jordan, and activists succeeded in stopping its screening in Ramallah despite El Basha's Venice award; some Palestinian and Muslim viewers boycotted it, criticizing Doueiri's history of filming in Israel and his depiction of Palestinians.³^•¹⁴^•¹⁹

Social context

The dispute lands on real fault lines. About 450,000 Palestinian refugees lived in Lebanon at the time of the film's release, roughly 10% of the population, with restricted access to work; Yasser is a refugee living in a camp, while Tony is a garage owner from a working-class neighborhood of eastern Beirut.²⁰^•¹³ The film's conflict also carries the weight of the civil war, which was triggered in part by the presence of armed Palestine Liberation Organization groups in the country's south, and reviewers noted that the story layers religion with class, age, education, and refugee status.¹⁴^•²¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2017 and 2018

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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