Darina Al-Joundi – författare

On the evening of her father''s funeral, while his family recites suras from the Koran, Noun interrupts the ceremony. Faithful to the memory of her father, a writer and journalist, a freedom fighter, she decides to put an end to this memorial and to make sure that her father''s last wishes are respected: to be buried to a jazz tune. Locked up with the dead body, Noun looks back on her experience in Lebanon. She reminisces about the war, the straitjacket of religion, the weight of prejudice and her struggle against an all-powerful male society that forbids women to speak.

Le Jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter (The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing) was an instant sensation when it was first performed as a one-woman play at the Avignon festival in July 2007: it sold out at every performance and resulted in multiple runs in Paris and throughout France.

Noun, the heroine of The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing, has left Lebanon to make a life for herself in Paris. Marseillaise My Way follows Noun''s adventures as she flees her home country and arrives in France, a place she believes to be the most secular country in the world, only to find her freedom threatened there too by soul-destroying red tape and the reality of cultural segregation. After having survived civil war, drug addiction, violent assaults, and enforced incarceration in a mental asylum, Noun embarks on a new struggle: to obtain French citizenship. To the refrain of ''La Marseillaise'', which she has learnt by heart for her citizenship test, Noun pursues her quest for a new life, calling into question the secular foundations of her new home and paying homage to women freedom fighters from across the Arab world.