PROCOVER
DRIVING GOOD Lina Matta has plenty of notches to her belt, from starting as a reporter in her home country, to producing documentaries in the US, to her current role as Director of MBC 2, MBC 4, MAX and Shahid AVOD. Sarah Nathan sat down with Matta to find out more about her professional journey A significant chunk of Lina Matta’s job is watching series and reading scripts to identify the best stories. From already having a catalogue in her brain, being exposed to TV and movies throughout her life and hearing stories from people around her, Matta has fine tuned her ability to find talent among storytellers. “There’s no science to it, it’s very instinctive and simply based on having been exposed to a lot of content.” Matta’s affinity for good stories was fostered from a young age, and she credits her family for it. “My mom, my dad, my aunt and my sister are great storytellers, and I’m a great listener. I developed a ear for what makes a good story through being surrounded by people who were amazing storytellers when I wasn’t. When Mom first started earning a salary, she would spend all her money on movie tickets. She’d be at the movies all weekend, watching two or three films in a row. We grew up exposed to storytelling in all its forms – theatre, film and television.” A second factor that propelled Matta towards storytelling was the ongoing war in her home country, Lebanon. Immersing herself in acting during her youth was a coping mechanism. “When you’re in a play, you’re part of that world and you’re able to escape your own. A lot of how I got into media was fed by my need to escape my reality.” With these interests, studying Radio/TV/Film at the Lebanese American University was a no-brainer. Her introduction to professional broadcasting was as a newscaster on the English-language evening news, and eventually she worked as a translator for foreign correspondents at the Daily Star. After pursuing a master’s in film in the US, she explored the world of documentaries but
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stuck to her journalistic roots, “transitioning into the news aspect more than the entertainment aspect” of production. For the next few years, Matta focused on her love of reporting in Washington, DC, where she covered Middle East news. Her time as a studio-based director at the Arab Network of America was a pivotal point for industry networking, as she met many people who eventually became contacts she has maintained throughout her career. “I was doing studio work and covered news shows, town hall meetings and talk shows, all of which was very exciting. There’s an adrenaline one gets from directing live shows.” However, she still felt a lingering hunger to cover stories out in the field and produced two documentaries with a partner for a production company, Brown Hats Production (BHP), that they co-founded. The first followed two women running for office in Bogotá and brought Matta to Colombia, giving her an experience and access to a world that she had never known. The second focused on women giving birth in New York prisons. “I thought it was a fascinating topic that I’d seen nothing on at the time. That project allowed me to learn about the prison system in New York and question what happens to pregnant women and what happens to kids raised in prison. Is allowing them to stay with their incarcerated mothers a good thing or a bad thing? “I got to explore how they were treating women and the whole debate about drug laws in the US and whether they were too strict. I knew nothing about that world until I got into it, and for the years I was working on that project I learned so much and accessed a world so parallel yet so different from my own.”
