An award-winning reflection on loneliness by Karim Rahbani

Lebanese filmmaker Karim Rahbani leaves a unique footprint in his short film “One Last Time”, collecting over ten awards with a consistency that speaks to something deeper than technical mastery. It speaks to a filmmaker who understands human fragility, and who knows how to translate that fragility into cinema.

Fresh off its latest triumph at the 18th Notre Dame University International Film Festival, Rahbani’s film won both Best Lebanese Film and the Audience Award, bringing its total to ten awards, a rare feat for a Lebanese short. For Rahbani, the win is a full-circle moment. Eleven years ago, his debut “With Thy Spirit” received its first accolades at the same festival. Returning with a new work, he says, “gives me a fabulous feeling of completing the circle.”

The symbolism runs deeper still: Rahbani’s father and co-writer Ghady Rahbani accepted the awards in Lebanon. For a filmmaker whose body of work is built on intergenerational questions, memory, and emotional inheritance, it mirrors the themes the film itself tackles.

A film with a human pulse

“One Last Time” is a 20-minute study of loneliness, aging, and the intangible threads that tie us to one another. It follows Toufic, an 80-year-old widower whose quiet life is disrupted first by the news of a friend’s passing, and then by an unexpected knock on the door, a woman whose presence momentarily reawakens the long-dormant tenderness within him.

The film sits at the intersection of humor and heartbreak. When Toufic’s friend encourages him to try a dating app, the story slides into a gentle absurdity that mirrors real life: the ways we reach for connection, even when the world has moved far beyond the rhythms we know. Through sparse dialogue and a poetic visual language, Rahbani turns Toufic’s inner world into something universal.

What does it mean to seek meaning at an age when society has already written your ending? What does companionship look like when life is already behind you? And how does a person rebuild warmth in a world that keeps forgetting its humanity? These questions unfold not through spectacle, but through subtlety, Rahbani’s signature.

A festival journey marked by excellence

The film premiered at the Red Sea Film Festival and soon after entered one of the world’s top short-film circuits: the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France. Its trajectory since then has been defined by momentum. Awards include:

Jury Award - Oran International Arab Film Festival

Jury Award - Bahrain Film Festival

Silver Hypatia Award - Alexandria Short Film Festival

Best Actor Award - Yerevan International Short Film Festival

Best National Film + Audience Award - Batroun International Mediterranean Film Festival

Jury Award - Holland MENA Film Festival

Audience Award - MedFest Egypt

And a long list of official selections across Europe and the Arab world.

Cinema as a human mirror

Rahbani’s filmmaking is not preoccupied with grandeur. It is preoccupied with people: their rituals, their grief, their searching. “One Last Time” is a story about aging, but it is also a meditation on the absurdity of modern loneliness and the universal desire to remain seen.

In a country where artistic production often battles instability, Rahbani’s film asserts that Lebanese cinema still knows how to feel, how to ask questions, and how to leave an imprint that is unmistakably human.