We get asked why we called our production company @lastfloorproductions. Sometimes we spin a tale about a writer sitting on the last floor of a building while the city sleeps. Burning the midnight oil. Doing everything they can to finish a draft. The reality is that in 2019, @dchabib @firasfiras__ & I came up with the idea for our own production house in DC’s apartment on the last floor of a building overlooking Beirut. A home that’s always filled me with its welcoming spirit & the ideas that swirl within it.
The years since we started have been what you might call, umm, challenging. A global pandemic hit just as we were about to start shooting our first series & shut down, well, everything. A few months later, the production office we moved into a few meters from the Beirut Port to run that same shoot, would meet a fate we’re all familiar with now. But we soldiered on. We created our first show for @shahid.vod from our homes in London, Beirut & Jeddah, at the peak of our anxiety over the first lockdown. We created our second show for Shahid on location around Beirut. It was joyous to be around talented people in person again. We created a combined 14 short films about incredible artists for @apple & @vamuseum that allowed us to look into different worlds in the US, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, India & Pakistan.
I am so incredibly proud of what we, and the 150+ people we have collaborated with these past two years, have achieved.
As we enter this new chapter, we have half a dozen projects at various stages of development & production (and varying levels of NDA 🤐) in North America, the UK, Lebanon & across the Gulf.
To mark this new chapter, we wanted a new identity. We reached out to the incredible team at @studiokawakeb They helped us interpret our mission as a production company rooted in the Middle East & its diasporas, based in London & Beirut - always in conversation with the whole world.
If this period in film and TV history has taught us anything, it’s that we can dream as big as we want. We can have global ambition. We just need to make good shit - great shit - and the rest will take care of itself eventually.
Looking forward to 2022.
