BEIRUT: "It's more inspired by my life," says Josef Fares, the 28-year-old writer and director of "Zozo," a new film that just opened in Beirut, about a ten-year-old boy who flees war-torn Lebanon to seek refuge with his grandparents in Sweden. Like his young protagonist (whose name Zozo, pronounced "zoo-zoo," is a diminutive for Josef), Fares left Lebanon for Sweden in 1987. But given the horrific circumstances that propel the young boy's harrowing emigration on screen, one has to ask, how fully autobiographical is this film?

"About 50 or 60 percent," says Fares, on the line from Sweden where he lives and works. "A lot of the script is made up as well."

Fares began making films when he was just 15. He shot upwards of 50 shorts before landing himself in film school in 1998. His feature debut - the comedy "Jalla! Jalla!" - was a box office smash hit and the most popular film in Sweden in 2000. His sophomore effort - another comedy called "Kopps" - did considerably well, too. Earlier this year, the film industry bible Variety named Fares one of ten upcoming directors to watch in 2006.

"Zozo" opens with a family of five, all struggling to hold onto their sanity through cycles of war and boredom, shelling and silence. If they can hang on long enough, they'll get their passports and plane tickets to Sweden.

Suffice it to say, Zozo ends up in Sweden alone, after experiencing a fast friendship with a tough-talking chick and a flicker of romance with a tough-talking girl, both of which salve his emotional and psychological wounds.

In Sweden, however, Zozo discovers that the cruelty of his classmates can be as perilous as the war he left behind, and the film progresses in the usual coming-of-age fashion.

As such, "Zozo" definitely marks a personal turn in Fares' career. His earlier works dealt with the Lebanese community in Sweden, but for the shooting of his latest film, he actually returned to Lebanon for the first time in 17 years.

"Because I was there as a director and not as a regular person, I couldn't really reflect on being there," he says. "I mean, I had a camera crew with me the whole time."

One of the biggest challenges was finding locations that still looked like the Lebanon of 20 years ago. Some of the sequences in "Zozo" were created on computer, with evidence of Beirut's reconstruction era digitally deleted.

Fares found certain vintage areas thanks to his intrepid young star, Imad Creidi.

For the role, Fares explains, "we auditioned 500 kids in Sweden and realized it would be impossible to find a kid who could speak Arabic without a broken accent." So Fares and his crew decided to talent scout on location in Lebanon instead.

"I knew the first time I saw him that he'd be in the movie," Fares says of Creidi. But the young actor grew into the lead only gradually.

Filling the role of Zozo's grandfather was equally serendipitous. Fares wanted to use his own grandfather for the part but, as he says bluntly, "he's dead."

Eventually he found the hilarious Elias Gergi living in rural Sweden. Throughout the film, Fares explains, "He's not acting. He's being himself."

"Normally I use family and friends in my movies," he adds. "My big brother, he's a big actor and a main character in all my films." Fares Fares, who starred in "Jalla! Jalla!" and "Kopps," speaks the part of the talking chick in "Zozo."

"Zozo" is a much darker film than Fares' previous efforts. The story demands serious emotional depth from the actors on screen. Pinning such a film on a child actor would seem to be a huge risk, but one of the reasons why Creidi performs so well is that his interior life explodes onscreen through moments of magic or fantasy.

"I'm kind of a little bit of a dreamer myself," says Fares. "The hardest thing about this film was to keep the balance between the dream world and the real world, and not to go too far in either direction. I wanted the feelings of the main character to be expressed through pictures, not through words."

"Also, as a director," he adds, "I don't feel I have to explain everything. The feeling is enough. I like to go with the flow. Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. But I like to work like that."