“It was a big production,” said Toufic Traboulsi wistfully from behind his modern desk in late September. Traboulsi is executive producer for Independent and a founder of the company, along with his brother, Samir. But like many other Lebanese, he could only watch helplessly as Hezbollah and Israel duked it out for 34 days with Lebanon as the battlefield. The shoot was cancelled, of course, and he sent much of his staff to Independent’s Dubai office for safety. The Beirut office remains open and the staff has since returned, but the business hasn’t. And Traboulsi doesn’t think it will for a long time.

“Right now, I’m not interested in putting more into this office,” he said. “Every time a war starts, we have to start all over again.”

He’s not alone. Since the July-August war, the mood among smaller Lebanese production companies is gloomy. Business is down, despite Lebanon’s advantages of a deep bench of talent and numerous locations. Clients are reluctant to invest in Lebanon while the security situation is still tenuous. Things seem more stable in Cairo and Dubai, the other two centers of video production. And Cairo is cheaper, if more bureaucratic and boasting fewer generic locations.
Not all is doom and gloom, however. Rotana, one of the largest players in the Lebanese market, is staying put despite moving two of its smaller channels to Cairo before the war. If Rotana stays committed to Beirut—and its spokeswoman here says her royal boss is fully committed to Lebanon—Beirut’s reeling production industry might get its legs back under it.
“People should calm down, take a deep breath, take a Xanax,” said Maya Chams, regional director of marketing and media for Rotana Group.

But not even the MTV of the Arab World is immune to change. Two weeks before the war, Rotana shifted two channels, Rotana Clip and Rotana Tarab, to Cairo. Chams says the moves were purely a business decision. “These two channels have a huge library of classical and new clips that air 24 hours a days, with no programs, and it was more convenient to have them air directly from Cairo from the same location as our movies channels Rotana Cinema and Rotana Zaman,” she said. “Nothing else has changed.”

Chams is annoyed by rumors, circulated in Lebanese newspapers and prompted by the two channels’ move, that Rotana was preparing to decamp to Cairo in the wake of the war. “We’re not moving anywhere. We’re here, we’re working, and life is back to normal.”

But not all the players in the business have Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as a CEO and backer. They don’t have Rotana's resources—the empire is expanding by opening a Rotana Café in downtown Beirut this fall—and Rotana’s focus on using Arab talent and operating in the Arab World insulates it somewhat from Western companies’ fears of Lebanon’s instability, an advantage that Chams acknowledges. Companies such as Independent, Signature Productions and The Talkies, while nowhere on the scale of Rotana, produce videos and commercials for Western clients and have to work harder to convince them to invest in Lebanon in the wake of a war.

“When it came to Europeans, Lebanon was always a difficult place to sell before the war,” said Gabriel Chamoun of The Talkies, whose main business is producing commercials for ad agencies. “People already had negative impressions.”

While he has no plans to leave Lebanon—Chamoun says his family is here and he feels a great sense of attachment to the country—he is opening an office in Cairo to complement the ones in he has already opened here and in Dubai. “As a Lebanese businessman I have no visibility for the next six months,” he said, because of the uncertainty about the security. “I don’t know what will happen.”

And that’s the real problem for smaller Lebanese productions companies and one of the reasons most of them maintain offices in Dubai and Cairo. However, Dubai is too expensive to shoot in for anything other than occasional shoots, and Cairo is a bureaucratic headache, with government regulations requiring companies to use only Egyptian talent, Traboulsi said. Lebanon has none of those problems. “It’s a service-oriented population, people are solution finders,” said Chamoun. “And production is mainly problem solving so it’s a good place to work.” Traboulsi summed it up even more pithily: “It’s fun,” he said. “Anything you want, you can have here.”

But the advantages of Lebanon have been lessened by the recent war. “I’m making the other offices work, pumping oxygen into this one and waiting to see what will happen,” said Traboulsi.
For the time being, business is badly off. In the past two years, the work doubled each year, he said. Now, there is no work. Foreign talent is afraid to come. Before the latest fighting, he was planning on buying a studio and setting up a film production house, but those plans are now on hold. He said he was also talking with an American director, who he declined to name, about coming to Lebanon to collaborate on several projects. “I can’t get him to come now.”

Paul Sabbagh, managing director of Signature Productions, echoes similar sentiments. Reached by phone in Dubai, where we was working on a shoot, he said, “It’s very slow [in Beirut]. We’re receiving feedback from clients and they don’t want to come back any more.” Eighty percent of his Ramadan business has gone to Cairo, he said, because it’s cheaper—and Ramadan is the bulk of his business. Established in 1995, Signature has offices and studios in Beirut, Dubai, Jeddah and Syria. Its clients include Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, and Nestle.

The Talkies and Chamoun aren’t faring much better. All activity for Chamoun stopped during the war, he said, with the exception of a single patriotic commercial his company produced, with a message dear to Chamoun’s heart: Stay in Lebanon. Even in his Dubai office work stopped. “The Lebanese war affected the whole region,” he said. “Advertisers weren’t in the mood for new commercials.”

Like his counterparts at Independent and Signature, Chamoun doesn’t know what the future holds. “Is Lebanon the best place on earth to make business projections?” he asked. “No, of course not.” With the current tense ceasefire between Israel and Hezballah holding but fragile, it’s unlikely things will get better. “We are committing suicide because of a hundred square meters filled with sheep,” Traboulsi said, referring to Shebaa Farms. “The problem is not knowing what will happen. If I knew, I’d know where to put my money. I don’t want to keep pushing and get nowhere.”