Discoveries from Lebanon World Cinema

Ghyd, a young dish cleaner for a high-class Lebanese restaurant gets the chance to be a waitress for a day. After serving coffee to a famous Lebanese singer, she steals her coffee cup and asks her grandmother to read it for her, pretending it's her own.

Amidst war, Joelle a young single mother, fights to protect her daughter after a terrorist bombing targets a nearby school bus. When a travel ban traps her 8-year-old, Joelle has no choice but to smuggle her across the Syrian-Lebanese border.

Draj El Wared is a grand theatrical tribute to the legendary Rahbani Brothers, celebrating the timeless spirit of Lebanese musical theater. Through a vibrant compilation of some of their most iconic scenes, songs, and dramatic moments, the play revives the charm, humor, emotion, and social commentary that made their works unforgettable across generations. Rather than retelling a single story, Draj El Wared weaves together beloved moments from multiple Rahbani productions into one unified stage experience, a nostalgic journey through the heart of Lebanese culture, music, and storytelling.

Ramzi, a blind man in his late 70's, lives alone in his suburban Beirut home, relying on Moussa, who cares for him like a son. As the Israeli aggression escalated, the pager attack took place, leaving Moussa and Ramzi in the darkness far from their life, plants and birds.

Along the Water is a poetic and reflective journey tracing a stream of water in reverse—from the Mediterranean Sea to the summit of Qornet el Sawda, the highest peak in the Middle East. Through the eyes of four individuals—activists, scientists, and storytellers—the film reveals the profound connections between people and the natural world.

A group of friends go to a house in the woods to play a game only for them to find themselves in it.

Sarah and Alex live with their parents in Lebanon and enjoy escaping into their imaginary world. One day, the family receives unexpected news that will change their lives forever.

Bourj Hammoud: The Value of the Existing is a documentary tracing a two-year architectural research project in one of Beirut’s densest and most layered neighborhoods, exploring how small, strategic interventions can improve daily life within severe economic and spatial constraints.

The best songs of Mary Souliman during her carrier.

In a small town on Mount Lebanon, a young boy tests God after his mother’s sudden death.

Jana" (2019) is a Lebanese short film that explores the emotional journey of a young woman caught between tradition and self-expression. Through intimate storytelling and a subtle visual style, the film reflects on identity, cultural pressures, and personal freedom.

An icon of the twentieth century the AK-47, or Kalashnikov is the most used and probably the most lethal machine gun ever. In the recent clashes in Lebanon, we suffered from the destructive lethality of this weapon and the need for dismantling it has become urgent. This project is a trial to take apart he AK-47 and degrade it from its terrible capacity to injure and kill by deconstructing it into pieces.

Film by Fajr Yacoub

Raed discovers by chance that the beautiful tree growing in front of his house is one of the invasive trees that threatens the environmental diversity in the Lebanese forest. He begins the journey of exploring this tree with his friend Hadi and Dr. Muhammad, who specializes in invasive plants, at a time when the country is exposed to another type of invasion represented by Israeli attacks on humans and their environment.

The Earth Weavers by Rima Kaddissi celebrates rural Lebanese women as they reclaim traditional knowledge and reconnect with the land. Through weaving, language, and resistance, they remind us that biodiversity is a cultural practice as much as an ecological one.

Julia Boutros in live concert at Platea on 2014.

In 1982, the war had spread to the Palestinian-Lebanese border, and the Israeli colonizers entered the Rashidiya camp in southern Lebanon. There, a number of young children were waiting for them. They were cubs of the Palestinian revolution, carrying RPG weapons and fighting the Zionist enemy. In this film, the director follows these children nearly 40 years after that anniversary.

During the July War of 2006, as warships evacuated foreigners and dual-nationality Lebanese, the “State of Israel” intercepted the broadcast of The Voice of the People radio station to deliver an audio message to Lebanese citizens. Israel interrupts the broadcast of "Sawt Al-Sha'eb," as Fairuz finishes performing Talal Haidar's poem "Wahdun" (They Alone) and starts singing another verse in which she declares her eternal love for Lebanon. Meanwhile, ships are evacuating those fleeing the flames of war—three enormous contradictions. Coincidence can carry so much meaning.

Intriguing and mesmerising This Madness of Loving employs effective animation techniques and engaging sound design to take us on an existential excursion from matter to light.

"Thank you Soma - شكراً صوما" explores the relationship between Nour, a young Lebanese woman, and Soma, the migrant domestic worker who’s played a large part in her upbringing. It is a reminder to us not to become complacent in the comfort of our daily lives and to continue to question the complexity and injustice inherent in being a migrant domestic worker today.

Impulsive Maya destroys her father's art, sparking a confrontation that reveals his hidden illness. Priorities shift as Maya rediscovers love for her ailing father.

A gypsy girl in love with a young thief is chased by an international gang because he hides gold in his possession, and the girl tries to know his secret, and the gang kidnaps him, and one of the young athletes saves the young hero, and hosts him with him, the young gypsy seeks to get closer again to the young thief in order to know the location of the hidden gold

The harvest is over, but a particularly severe drought is causing water problems in the village. Every season, a play is performed in the village, and this year's play is entitled ‘Departures’.

A one-of-a-kind documentary exploring the lives of lesbians in Lebanon. Who are they, where do they hang out, what do they wear, and most importantly, how do they negotiate their desires within a troubled nation like Lebanon? This documentary will open a window to a hidden world, and introduce you to women who are savvy, sexy and confident about themselves. It will delight and surprise you! ​

Lebanon, 2019-2023: a chronicle of the uprising, its fading and its end. From collective hope to intimate pain, can cinema resist the irreversible?

Following the destruction of the August 4, 2020 explosion in Beirut, this film examines a material politics of glass embedded in the collective Lebanese psychology. Using the genre of the essay-film , it unpacks a history of repeated political violence, while expanding the semiotics of glass to reveal the different social and cultural disparities within Beirut's built environment and the many dichotomies of its lived experience.

During a date with Alex, Omar seems a bit disconnected. A game with Alex triggers him to explode and talk about everything he has experienced as an immigrant.

A biography of the late filmmaker, Maroun Bagdadi, portraying the stages of his life, excerpts from his interviews and films until the very last moments of his life.

What if a man and a woman switch roles, and she decides to wash her honor by killing her husband?

Nourhane was a singer and actress, active between the 1940s and the 1960s. In the mid-1960s, she abruptly ended her career. Her granddaughter, May Kassem, uncovers layer after layer of her grandmother's life to uncover the reason for her departure from the stage.

Since 1969, the Modca Café on Hamra Street has been synonymous with Beirut. Now, after more than thirty years, it is being demolished. In the young people fighting helplessly to preserve this embodiment of the city’s memory, we see a longing for and a vicarious experience of ‘social activism’. The camera attempts to resist traditional video activism as it accompanies these young people. Moving into the fluorescent light of the newly built mass retailer, the identity of the city is superimposed onto the fate of the café. A bold documentary essay that attempts to awaken various collective memories.

YouTuber Anthony Sargon spends 3 days with Lebanese TikTok legend and Kung-Fu master Joseph Merheb in an effort to learn more about him.

In a heartfelt tribute to her beloved city of Beirut, a filmmaker weaves together the intertwined narratives of her two grandmothers, both named Noha. Through a tapestry of still images shot entirely on 35mm film, their respective stories, filled with love and cherished memories, preserve their legacy, ensuring that their stories will forever be etched in the city's heart.

Shot entirely on location in Lebanon at the height of the 'October Revolution' - 'Valens' chronicles the journey of Faisal Nassar; An impassioned young man who's quest for change amidst his corrupt and decaying city leads him to discover the lengths he's willing to go to make a difference.

A Beirut rooftop conversation about living with Sexually Transmitted Infections opens into a cinematic dialogue, as Danielle and Moe draw raw and vibrant images from their personal experiences. Danielle filmed herself in sober and melancholic images to grasp what is going on, while Moe plays with memories and sensations of a queer body “invaded” by a virus. While they engage with five actresses and actors to embody the testimonies of individuals who also lived with STIs, “forbidden” stories begin to exist and enter a collaborative exploration of intimacy, bodies, stigma and shame.

15 years later, Jad faces a self-confrontation and blames himself for not being able to protect it, from the recurring sexual abuse by a family member.

The film depicts the many Lebanese and Palestinian Resistance acts carried out by different factions against the Israeli occupation in Lebanon.

Far away from home, and after becoming auditorily impaired with a tinnitus as a result of the Beirut blast of August 4th, Tahara, a Lebanese immigrant in Europe, tries singing again, but homesickness overtakes her every emotion. Water is a sensory key element that reminds her of home, by the Mediterranean sea, where her heart and mind are at ease.

Fouad, a 60-year-old man, goes to the police station to confess to a crime he committed when he was younger. After a lengthy day of investigation, the cops are still baffled by Fouad's story and begin to wonder if his confession is a made-up tale.

A love letter to hands

A city emerges in the middle of the desert and dies in its richness. Women are doubly veiled, and freedoms are even more threatened. Sarah was born the day after the oil boom. She is part of the generation that believes it can get anything with the power of money, and that simultaneously sees its every desire thwarted when it conflicts with the strict laws of its country. She is unsettled by the triviality of her life and unsettles others through her beauty, and her will to push everything to its extreme. She fears not the desert, not the wind, nothing. Her thirst lies elsewhere: to leave the desert, which she hates, and in which she is kept against her will. She wanders the empty streets in her limousine, killing time on the phone, provoking strangers. Gradually, tensions arise in this desert, instilling a latent anguish interrupted by bursts of happiness, of ecstatic laughter, and of sensuality, until everything comes to a head.

A woman, alone in bed at night, starts having weird convulsions after a mysterious phone message. A green stain of mold starts growing on the wall in front of her. How will she escape the night?

Following the operation against the Israeli sports delegation participating in the Munich Olympics in Germany in 1972, the Zionist entity launched retaliatory raids against the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon (specifically the village of Da'al in Syria and the Nabatieh camp in Lebanon) on September 8th, 1972. In reflecting the sheer barbarism of the Zionist aggression, legendary Palestinian filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali is compelled to reach for new filmic grammar to reflect on the brutality. This is a film haunted and haunting, with unfiltered images of death. Lifeless babies, features bloated. Children in hospital beds, limbs twisted, faces bruised. Agony. Skulls shattered. Hands crushed. Occasionally, lifeless eyes blink, a twitch of the hand brings something akin to hope – that life persists, life could persist.

Beirut seen by 5 artists from different fields and generations: theatre man Jalal Khoury, filmmaker Borhane Alaouié, musician Ahmed Kaabour, photographer Hratch Tokatlian and painter Maya el Hage are filmed by Hady Zaccak.

A poor young man lives in a simple room and falls in love with a rich girl, but her father, the property owner, rejects their relationship which complicate matters greatly.

The artist, filmmaker, and archivist Alaa Mansour lives between Marseille and Beirut, and her work focuses on the history of violence and the power of images in the era of necropolitics. In her proposal for st_age, The mad man's laughter (2021), she reflects on the phenomenon of the industrialization of death based on the murder on October 16, 2020, of teacher Samuel Paty in France for showing caricatures of Muhammad in class to discuss freedom of expression. This terrible event sparked numerous reactions and hate speech towards Islam, bringing back to the table some issues that remain unresolved to this day. Using archival material and computer-generated images, sounds, and texts, Mansour navigates the latent and visible spaces of violence generated by the production of colonial-militarist images and the data used to generate algorithmic biases.

When her father becomes suddenly paralyzed, the filmmaker spends four years in between hospitals finding shelter behind her camera away from a family tragedy. Rehabilitation centers, cemeteries, love making, VR experiments, fervent prayers and voice notes are the record of a filmmaker’s journey trying to amend the impossible: finding absolution for a broken family by making her father walk again.

Erotic voice messages and secret night meetings connect two women as they try to live out their forbidden love in Beirut.

A leading figure in the Palestinian cause and the fight against imperialism, the Lebanese communist activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah had been languishing in French prisons for thirty-eight years—a unique case in France. Arrested in Lyon in 1984 with false papers, he was sentenced two years later to four years in prison for possession of weapons and explosives, then in 1987 received a life sentence for complicity in the assassinations in Paris five years earlier of an Israeli Mossad agent and an American military attaché—charges he has always denied. Although he has been eligible for release since 1999, French political authorities, under pressure from the United States and Israel, opposed his release. Interventions by Palestinian figures, his relatives, his lawyer and ex-prisoners from the extreme left, retrace the journey of the village schoolteacher who became an anti-colonial activist.

In the middle of chaotic Beirut, two gay men decide to live openly their sexuality. This is where the dilemma starts; lovers, sex, family, society, photoshoots.

Once again, the comedian Abbas Shaheen and his fiancée Rima are trying to get the necessary money that will enable them to travel abroad, and start a reckless journey on a bus, and they face Aqaba after the other, so will they succeed this time in this very tight time?

Ismail Shammout, an artist who is primarily known for his paintings, also served as director of the Cultural Arts Section of the PLO and worked with the organization’s Film Unit in the 1970s. In this short film, Shammout records a solidarity song by the Palestinian Egyptian singer Zeinab Shaath to announce the most urgent call of Palestine. The song and the words of Kamal Nasser that break through the ballad continue to hold striking relevance today. Lyrics by Lalitha Punjabi.

Orwa Al Mokdad starts a journey from Daraa, southern Syria, to Aleppo, northern Syria, to understand the reasons that have shattered the whole Arab region over the country’s history and the distance that has grown for the past five years, since the beginning of the Syrian war. A distance that has split the region and its inhabitants into North and South.

An isolated convent, where a group of nuns once lived happily, was visited by the Monsignor. He comes to announce that their land will be sold. During the visit, he steps on a mine that dates from the war times. Everything goes downhill, the panic sets, the faith is questioned and the madness of each of the sisters comes to light...

Set in the industrial suburbs of Beirut, Majnounak explores male sexuality through interviews with men who recount one of their sexual relationships. Attentive to details of body and sexual language, songs, indications of each interlocutor’s erotic imaginary, the film tries to sketch a portrait of the ”male” they identify with. Patterns emerge, as do norms, but also an unsuspected map of Beirut’s sites of sexual encounters.