George Clooney’s Beirut Bank Heist Is Lebanon’s Ticket to the Oscars
Lebanon has picked Furies, a George Clooney-backed thriller about two sisters who rob a Beirut bank of their own frozen savings, for the international Oscar race.
Two sisters, a vault stuffed with their own frozen savings, and George Clooney’s name on the credits. Lebanon has chosen Furies, Rami Kodeih’s thriller about two women who break into a Beirut bank to take back the money it seized from them, as its entry for the Oscar for best international feature. The country’s selection committee picked it unanimously.
The film’s executive producers are Clooney and his partner Grant Heslov, whose company, Smokehouse Pictures, made Argo. Clooney walked the red carpet at its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 4 September, two days after Venice handed him a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
Robbing a bank of your own money
Furies is set in Beirut in the spring of 2020, months after Lebanon’s banks locked depositors out of their savings in a collapse the World Bank ranked among the three worst anywhere since the 1850s. Maro (Rym Mroue), a divorced hairdresser who has lost her salon, and her sister Dalia (Maria Nakouzi), who has cancer and cannot pay for surgery, plan to empty the vault overnight. Maro maps the building with her son’s Lego. Dalia vomits on a teller to get into the staff toilets. Two hopeless male accomplices, played by Issam Bou Khaled and Hasan Akil, make sure the plan unravels.
The story is Kodeih’s own. He wrote it with his wife, Nora Mariana, who needed surgery when the banks froze her savings. “One day, we were not able to access our money and that was extremely traumatic,” Kodeih said. Mariana never got her money back. Her family sold her grandfather’s house to pay for the operation.
Lebanon got there before the screenwriters. In September 2022 Sali Hafiz walked into a Beirut branch of Blom Bank with her nephew’s toy pistol and left with about $13,000 of her family’s own savings to treat her sister’s cancer. “I did not come to kill anyone or to start a fire. I came to claim my rights,” she said. A month earlier a man had held a Beirut bank hostage with a rifle to get at his frozen $200,000 for his father’s hospital bills. In Lebanon, the heist movie is a documentary with better lighting.
The critics have been kind to the debutant. After Venice the film went on to Toronto and London, and RogerEbert.com called it “one of the more confident and riveting debuts of 2026”.
Clooney’s Lebanese family
Clooney’s attachment to Lebanon came with his wife. Amal Clooney was born in Beirut in 1978 and was two when her family fled the civil war for England. Since their wedding in Venice in 2014, her country has become his cause. In 2017 their foundation began putting Syrian refugee children into Lebanese public schools. “This country has a population of four million people and it’s hosting two million refugees,” Clooney told me in Toronto that year, as he explained why he and Amal chose Lebanon. After the Beirut port explosion of August 2020 the couple gave $100,000 to the Lebanese Red Cross and two other charities.
Amal has paid a price of her own for Lebanon. As a prosecutor at the international tribunal that tried members of Hezbollah for the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, she had to shelter in a bunker in Beirut, a danger Clooney discussed with me in 2019.
An American keeps his word
In 2018, when I asked Clooney about Hollywood’s treatment of Arabs, he made a promise and confessed a limit. “I agree with you that Hollywood has presented Arabs as villains for a long time, and we have to change that,” he said. He defended Syriana, which he produced in 2005: “When we made Syriana, the Arabs weren’t villains. Even though the Arab was a terrorist, we also saw how that happened, and we tried to show it clearly to the audience.” Then came the confession: “I’m not an Arab, so I present the American point of view in my films.”
Furies is how he squared that circle. Smokehouse has put its name behind an Arabic-language film written and directed by Lebanese film-makers, shot in Lebanon, about a catastrophe Lebanese banks inflicted on Lebanese people. The American point of view stays where it belongs, in the producers’ credits.
Clooney now needs to bring the luck he brought to Argo, which won him an Oscar for best picture. Lebanon has entered 22 films for the award and been nominated only twice, for Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, which went home empty-handed in 2018, and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum a year later. The Academy announces its shortlist of 15 on 15 December and the five nominees on 21 January.
Whatever the voters decide, the bankers who swallowed Lebanon’s savings are still at large. On screen, at least, two sisters get to rob them back.
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