Representation of female characters as protagonists in Nadine Labaki cinema

Cinema creates discourses while conveying real or fictional events in the center of film narration. Discourses are treansfered through dialogues and cinematographic elements. In this research, how female characters are represented as protagonists in Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's movies "Caramel" and "Where do We Go Now?" is analyzed with the discourses used in the narrative of the movies. In this context, movies were evaluated with the method of "critical discourse analysis" and the representation of women was examined in the context of both narrative theory and representation theory. The dialogues and cinematographic elements used in the movies provided the transfer of the meaning created by woman perspective. As a result, in Nadine Labaki movies, female characters are represented as the main characters with strong and intelligent qualities at the center of the narrative, contrary to the week female stereotypes in classical narrative cinema. Key words: Narrative Theory, Representation Theory, Women in Cinema.