Hard cash for hard talk?

If you contemplate how local creativity has fared in the past 20 to 30 years, and especially if you contrast Lebanese creative and cultural content productions with productivity and innovation in the real economy, content has traversed a very long road in a very short time indeed. There could hardly be greater diversity, for example, between a 2007 play on the glory and fall of heroic Queen Zenobia and a 2021 animation movie on the fictitious Arab dictatorship of Alephia, nor could their creative pathways be more constructively conflicting. The first production, Zenobia, being a Mansour Rahbani tale set to music and dance, extols the near-mythical queen of the fleeting Palmyrene Empire of third century AD fame and her tragic desire to build an identity. The second, Alephia 2053, being an hour-long animation movie in the dystopian genre, advocates a very young-adult message of fighting corruption, martyrdom for the cause