Director Alain Guiraudie's gay-themed
film Stranger By The Lake (L'Inconnu du lac) has been
banned in Lebanon.
According to Deadline.com,
the French film was scheduled to screen at the Beirut Film Festival
on Saturday. Censors said the film does “not meet its criteria.”
The film premiered in May in the Un
Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where
Guiraudie won the award for best director. The film also took home
the Queer Palm award.
The film stars Pierre de Ladonchamps as
a gay man who falls in love with another man he meets at a cruising
spot for gay men along the shore of a lake. (A trailer for the film
is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
In a video clip promoting the film's
inclusion at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF),
Guiraudie said that the film's lake location was beautiful and
“menacing or fearful.”
“There's two sides to the coin with
this type of location,” he
said. “You've got paradise, on the one hand, and hell on the
other.”