From Silence to Fire: The Evolution of ‘Incendies’ from Play to Film

It wasn’t until a few days ago, when a publishing house sent me a copy of a play collection titled Littoral & Incendies, that I realized Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies—a film I deeply admire—was actually adapted from a stage play of the same name. The playwright is Wajdi Mouawad, a renowned Lebanon-born Canadian citizen as well as a France-based dramatist. In April 2016, he began residing in France and became the artistic director of Paris’s La Colline National Theatre (Théâtre national de la Colline). This year, he personally directed a play he wrote at the age of 23, Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons (Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons), which recently premiered at the La Colline National Theatre. Like Incendies, the story also is set in Lebanon, his war-torn homeland of several millennia, and performed in Arabic with French subtitles.

Thanks to the gift from the publisher, I revisited Incendies which premiered at the Venice Film Festival 15 years ago with the original play script in hand this time round. Comparing the script and the film, I was once again struck by Villeneuve’s remarkable ability to absorb, adapt, and retell a story. At the same time, I had to admit: the unique charm of the stage play is something that cinema can never fully replace.

The first scene of the play takes place in a notary’s office. Simon, an amateur boxer, is furious with his recently deceased mother, Nawal, for leaving behind a baffling task for him and his twin sister Jeanne. He lashes out and flatly refuses to carry out her final request—delivered through the notary—which is to find the brother he never knew existed and hand him a letter. From the start, Simon struggles to understand why their mother would regularly attend court hearings that had nothing to do with their family, or why she suddenly stopped talking altogether. This confusion gradually turns into anger. He believes that, in her final years, she had already abandoned her twins emotionally, and the will is likely a product of delusion that is not worth taking seriously.

Villeneuve’s film opens differently. Set to Radiohead’s You and Whose Army?, it lingers on a house in the barren Lebanese countryside. Inside, a group of child soldiers is being trained. The camera fixates on a cold-eyed boy having his head shaved, then moves down to reveal three moles on his right heel. Through the boy’s piercing gaze, the film transitions to the notary’s office in Quebec. Simon does not erupt in fury at his mother; instead, he exhibits a quiet indifference. Though reluctant to carry out the strange tasks in her will, he still wants to give his mother a proper and dignified burial.

In both the play and the film, the notary’s reading of Nawal’s will occurs early on and introduces what is arguably the thematic core of the story: “Childhood is a knife stuck in the throat. It cannot be removed easily.” In the film, this metaphor seems to have been adapted into “a fishbone stuck in the throat.” My French is getting rusty, so I cannot be completely sure.

Both the play and the film transition from the notary’s office to a university classroom. In the play, Jeanne is a mathematics lecturer. She gives a lesson on graph theory—its unknowability and ultimately unsolvable nature—using the example of a pentagon-shaped house with five family members. From any one vantage point, only three sides are visible. This subtly foreshadows her journey to uncover their mother’s hidden past. At the same time, Simon is shown training in the boxing ring, where his coach scolds him for his poor observational skills.

In the film, Jeanne is reimagined as a teaching assistant. The focus shifts to a professor who declares to the class, “The area of mathematics we are about to enter will present problems that lead to even more difficult problems.” Villeneuve’s adaptation here tightens the narrative flow by dropping the pentagon metaphor and the boxing critique—symbols that, while layered, may have overburdened the story with excessive mystery. His streamlined approach avoids dragging the film down with unnecessary symbolism.

The film then addresses Nawal’s sudden muteness. Continuing from the academic setting, it transitions to a flashback by a pool: Nawal, sitting on a deck chair, is abruptly struck silent. In contrast, the play first hints at her muteness during the opening notary scene through Simon’s complaints—he recalls that his mother went to observe a public trial, then stopped speaking after returning home. However, the true cause of her silence isn’t revealed until near the end of the script. Only then does the twins’ long-lost brother Nihad, the most brutal perpetrator of the Lebanese Civil War, take the stand and smugly confess his crimes. He then recounts a childhood memory, which ultimately explains the trauma that rendered Nawal speechless.

Villeneuve transforms this narrative pivot, replacing the play’s symbolic red clown nose—its central MacGuffin—with three moles on the boy’s right heel. This change preserves the ultimate secret until the film’s jaw-dropping finale.

In the courtroom scene of the play, Nihad looks back on his childhood after boasting about his atrocities: “This thing is proof of my origins, my dignity in a sense, because, according to rumor, my mother gave it to me. A red clown nose. My dignity is a grotesque face left to me by the person who gave me life. Let me put it on and sing a song I wrote myself, to save that dreadful and boring dignity.”

At the end, this monstrous figure opens the letter handed to him by Simon. Inside is Nawal’s parting message to her son: “You stood up. You took out the clown nose. My memories exploded.”

Lines like these, powerful on stage, are steeped in theatricality and not well-suited to the naturalism of cinema. Villeneuve’s decision to replace the clown nose with three moles on the heel is nothing short of genius—it is a masterstroke of cinematic adaptation.

In the play, many scenes shift fluidly between Quebec and Lebanon, between the present lives of the twins and their mother’s past. On stage, these timelines are able to coexist in a poetic and intertextual way. In the film, however, some of that had to be sacrificed. Even for Villeneuve—now a master of contemporary cinema, capable of conveying moral anguish with great skill—there is no real way to express the cruelty of time on screen. On stage, time can be collapsed; the causes of the past can manifest as the consequences of the present.

In one pivotal moment from the play, Nawal recounts to her best friend a memory of a bus attack: “A woman was holding her child in the fire. Her flesh melted. The child’s flesh melted too. Everyone was burned! Time no longer existed. There was no more time. Time was a chicken whose head had been cut off. Time ran left and right like a madman. The blood gushing from its severed neck washed over us and drowned us.”

Villeneuve reimagines this moment cinematically through a flashback to Nawal’s life during the Lebanese Civil War. On a rural road, a bus full of Muslim refugees is stopped by Christian Phalangist militia. They open fire at the bus, killing almost everyone on board except Nawal and a mother and daughter. The militia then douses the bus with petrol and prepares to set it on fire. Squirming out for survival, Nawal quickly pulls out a crucifix and takes the child with her, claiming the child as her daughter. However, when the bus is set ablaze, the child runs back to her mother and is shot dead. Unlike the play, which deliberately avoids specifying political factions, the film makes the sectarian conflict explicit.

The play also emphasizes the importance of Nawal’s grandmother in the Lebanese countryside, who urges her granddaughter to leave the village and break the cycle of generational hatred and revenge: “Go to school, learn to read, learn to think.”

Villeneuve includes this grandmother figure in the film as well. The grandmother similarly encourages Nawal to pursue education in the city. But the film goes further: it shows how Nawal’s education comes not only from school, but from life itself—raw, brutal, and merciless. So when she later volunteers to infiltrate a militia leader’s home as a tutor to carry out an assassination, she delivers a line that starkly contrasts theory with experience: “My uncle, the chief editor of a newspaper, believed that language and books could bring peace. I shared his ideals. But life taught me something else. And I intend to teach our enemies what life has taught me.”

I believe Villeneuve’s original line here would resonate just as powerfully if spoken on stage—it invites deep reflection.

Of course, what life ultimately taught Nawal far exceeds even the brutality of war. It is an absurd and unbearable tragedy. Her only way of enduring it is through a deafening silence—until her twin children, who are tasked to carry out her final wishes, uncover the truth about their father and brother. Only then can the rage be quelled: “Childhood is a knife stuck in the throat, and you know how to pull it out.”