Discoveries from Lebanon World Cinema

Directed by Nabiha Lutfi.

Set in the village of Bazouriye in South Lebanon, "66 Days" follows filmmaker Joude Bazzoun’s return to her homeland after witnessing Israel’s 2024 assault on Lebanon from abroad. Through intimate conversations with her family, Joude uncovers the losses they have suffered as a result of the war. The film reflects on the importance of memory and tradition by exploring the ritual of a card game and family gatherings. 66 days quietly resists erasure, preserving the family’s stories and heritage while celebrating the defiant joy found in simple family traditions.

A native Beiruti takes a journey to the edge of her city, where she is drawn to explore a state of oneness with an endemic flower. The flower's endangered status stirs up questions about the scattered sense of belonging and duality of her world. Through diverse encounters, the flower reveals herself as the protagonist, and invites the narrator to explore the wilderness and brutality of Beirut's last remaining public coastal areas.

Richard and Kim co-create imagined moments of their future together; moments shadowed by Kim's sudden autism diagnosis and looming illness. As Richard cares for his partner, he is forced to confront a buried childhood trauma: the helplessness of watching his mother die. This hybrid film becomes an intimate portrait of love, loss, and the ghosts we carry, weaving a raw, emotional journey through memory, imagination, and the fear of failing those we love most.

A documentary film about the director's mother and her experience in the Lebanese Civil War and how she is now. The theme of the film is the lack of identity and belonging and what it feels like to leave your country for a better life when you never wanted to leave in the first place.

Abstract images and written text are the two components of this testimony of domestic violence, physical and psychological, that shaped the narrator’s childhood. It is told by a woman who recalls diffuse memories of a decade of abuse endured by her and her sisters, and their escape from it. The text, which appears on screen sentence by sentence, does not tell the entire story. These are fragments, snippets, shards of a story.

A woman navigates grief.

Julia, a young Lebanese-Canadian journalism student lives with and cares for her reserved grandfather, Antoine. Julia attends a class on the Lebanese Civil War, where her professor tells a story about his experience as a foreign journalist covering the war. Having been sheltered from this reality her entire life, Julia is moved by the stories he tells and the images he shows. She is struck by one image in particular, that of a woman who seems so familiar to her. She seeks answers from her professor, who seems startled by her line of questioning, and evades answering her all together. Determined to get an answer, Julia returns home to continue her search, looking through old documents and photos, awaiting her grandfather’s return. Once home from his evening stroll, for the first time in her life, Julia reaches out and asks about his past in Lebanon and finally learns of the fate of her grandmother.

A short drama movie about liberating the noarders.

Tom's work as a dishwasher is usually quite straightforward, but then he is allocated the task of cleaning a rectangular plate…

As war engulfs South Lebanon, a family flees their home while bombs reduce their town to ruins. Returning to devastation, they find only fragments of what once was, yet among the wreckage, the community clings to a fragile hope that peace and renewal will come.

We follow the self-assertive journey of a woman who grew up as a boy in Lebanon, in a Muslim household, who then moved to Ukraine for her studies in medicine, only to end up escaping the war to Berlin, and becoming what she's always dreamed to be: a female dance performer.

On the day of his 18th birthday, the son of a fighter killed on the battlefield receives an unexpected gift from his uncle.

In Shift, Sherine Raffoul and Moussa Shabandar trace the transformation of a former bird hunter into a passionate conservationist. What emerges is a story of hope, self-reflection, and the power of small actions to reverse ecological harm.

Julia Boutros in live concert at Lebanon Casino on 2008.

Opening with the harrowing 2000 press footage of Palestinian boy Mohamad al-Durra’s death in his father’s arms, Eliane Raheb’s film becomes both witness and participant. Her camera travels through Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, tracing the lives of countless “young Mohamads” - children forced to grow up too soon in a world shaped by the intifada. As the journey unfolds, the filmmaker’s quest becomes deeply personal, prompting her to reflect on her place within the Arab world and to question her relationship with Palestine.

In 1956, a young boy named Feris Abou Shaaya teased his crush, Abir, while she was hanging clothes in nature, using a little girl to steal her cloth. Little did he know that their time together would be tragically cut short when she was killed in an earthquake. It's my grandfather, he vividly recalls his last moment of youth with my grandmother through his poignant poetry.

"Filmed on location in war-torn Beirut, this straightforward, partisan documentary is an indictment of right-wing terrorism against the Armenian ethnic community in Lebanon, and a rallying target audience is primary-students, the presentation is conceptually very simple. The film cannot compete in technical finish with slicker and enormously better-financed productions which present an opposing view of the conflict in Lebanon. Nevertheless, the filmmaker's perspective and prescriptive message have been vindicated by events which have taken place in the years since its first release." – M.M.

THE INCOMPETENTS. Experimental fiction from 2013.

A short video diary, recorded just days after the war erupted in 2006. Singing, intermittently drowned out by the sounds of gunfire and sirens outside, gradually gives way to fear. This film is far more than a testimony; it is a means of being heard, a tribute to the displaced, the dead, the martyrs, and the wounded. Pain and dignity are etched on the silent faces that pass by.

A film director, facing a creative block, follows a woman through her day, only to find himself entangled in a deeper mystery.

A visually striking meditation on loss and a perceptive political critique, this deeply personal work has two subjects: filmmaker Olga Nakkas' ailing mother and the chaotic country where Nakkas was raised. Both fell sick in 1975, the onset of incurable depression for one and a bloody civil war ushering in deep divisions for the other. In this sequel to LEBANON: BITS AND PIECES (1994), Nakkas ponders the plight of the country she clearly loves while honoring the mother dear to her.

A visual poetry collage reflecting the director's journey as a queer Arab immigrant, exploring identity, belonging, and the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion. Inspired by Omar J Saker’s poetry book ”The Lost Arabs,” it conveys the emotional struggles of a queer Arab artist.

A love story is born between a bicycle rider (Jihad) and the blind girl (Mona), after they meet on a ship returning to Lebanon, and in Beirut they part without knowing each other's address, (Jihad) searches for (Mona), until he reaches her through the sister (Mona), at the same time (Jihad) tries to avenge his friend who was killed by a drug gang

The only beautiful daughter of Captain Fouad dies by a gang, so he decides to take revenge on the daughter's killers out of his work, and out of harming them

Amid the tumult of Beirut, Alia meets Abu Samra, a man training to gain superpowers. She decides to train with him. Their shared monsters help them make sense of the insanity of Lebanon.

Depicts the war against Israeli operations in southern Lebanon in 1973.

A young man in his twenties, the ghost of a war memory coming from his childhood hovers around his head. The ghost tries to control the innocent memory of his inner child. The meanings that he loved when he was young began to change and become other harsh and painful meanings, so he finds his salvation in the same place from which death came.

What is behind Israel's war on Gaza? Why do so many Palestinians support armed struggle? Why are Israel and Hezbollah on the brink of full-scale war? In this hard-hitting debut documentary, Lebanese-Australian lawyer Nicholas Hanna explores these questions and crucial context largely ignored by mainstream media. Filmed in Lebanon and Occupied Palestine, The Last Sky is a must see documentary for anyone interested in understanding the current Gaza war and the escalating conflict in the region.

Ramzi spends his time alone at home. He found refuge in his studio, crouching over his piano as if it was his last prayer. It was not the noise of the world outside that bothered him. It rather inspired him at some moments in his journey. Ramzi found peace in himself. He said what he had to say and left us his music. Will all these unfinished melodies pave a way out to freedom?

Back when sexuality was a "source of life" and free from contemporary prejudices. A short essay film documenting a radical historiography of women's sexuality through artwork from the ancient Asian hemisphere.

Song of All Ends gently leads us into the daily life of a family living in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, sixteen months after the dreadful port explosion. With slow determination the atmosphere builds through intriguing, as-yet unconnected, images in stark black-and-white – the face of a young girl, a teddy bear, rags flapping in the breeze, roofs strewn with rubble and tarpaulins. Water streams everywhere and skeletal buildings are set against a grey sky littered with clouds.

Roger, a beloved basketball coach, is on his way to work, proudly carrying a chocolate box announcing the birth of his baby boy. His trip is disrupted when he witnesses a horrific act of violence on the street. He observes without intervening from the safety of the pavement; not attempting to help.

We have fallen, and are trying to get back up. We move on. The world continues to spin and we spin with it in search for our daily sustenance. We have become like recycled pieces of plastic, looking for a better reality.

Starting with her obsessive love of ports, filmmaker Diana Al-Halabi narrates her experience on a tugboat in the port of Beirut in 2017. The film departs from the port of Rotterdam and deals with loss, distance, death, and the undead. In 2020, the blast at the port of Beirut created a torsion in time. Diana narrates this experience from different perspectives. Port workers narrate their direct exposure to trauma and loss, while the filmmaker narrates her relationship to them, and how the disaster cannot be contained through a screen.

A poetry film written by Ibrahim Nehme and directed by Tanya Traboulsi, the artist featured in the exhibition Beirut, Recurring Dream. It follows Nehme's journey of healing after the explosion at the port of Beirut, and in parallel, the rising and setting of the sun against the monumental backdrop of the port itself, where over 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded on August 4, 2020.

Since 2019, menstrual products have been unaffordable for almost three quarters of the Lebanese population. Jeyetna draws ten intimate portraits of women experiencing period poverty (including Amira, a refugee from Syria, Gigi, a transgender woman, and Funmi, a migrant worker from Nigeria).

For many inhabitants of this world, the dystopia is not a future possibility but rather a historical reality. Odorless Blue Flowers Awake Prematurely is dystopian nonfiction, a science-fiction documentary, which explores Beirut’s peripheral rustbelt that sits on the banks of the city’s river and is affected by the blast on August 4, 2020.

In this depiction of a modern dystopian metropolis, the filmmaker and friends try to make sense of Beirut in the 30 years since the civil war. Nadim Mishlawi journeys through its recent history via a rich archive – capturing a place caught ‘between states of being and fading’. The textures of the environment are further enhanced through the use of an evocative soundscape. Stories held within the fabric of buildings and their surroundings emerge, begging us to consider the way we live, how we can learn from the past and the importance of finding some harmony between the natural and man-made world.

A video with 5 movements, about fading wishes, about plagues and dreams, about loneliness and absence.

Combining music and film, this work is based on archival footage from the 1920s captured in Lebanon by Pathé and Gaumont. “Topology of an Absence” proposes a new way to look at this archive, a hundred years after unnamed camera operators filmed the city of Beirut and captured bodies, faces, and eyes.

This documentary tells the story of Ibrahim Mokdad, a queer Lebanese refugee who finds himself in Germany after years of violence in his home country. Following Ibrahim’s narration, we trace his path from prison and hospitals, to refugee camps and a hard-won home. Ibrahim’s story shares a deeply personal and eye-witness perspective into Fortress Europe—the policies that have rendered migration treacherous and often deadly—as well as the nuanced challenges LGBTQ+ refugees face in their homelands, en route, and during resettlement.

Elektra, My Love (89 min, 2021) is a kammerspiel-film set in the moody, cavernous ruin of the Piccadilly Theater, Beirut’s extravagant art palace destroyed after the Lebanese Civil War, the film recounts three days in the life of five actresses. The women seek to revive the ghostly theater with an experimental production of Sophocles’ Elektra. In writing and directing the film, I wanted to show the austere fall of the people of Beirut after decades of war, within my own dream of the passage of the soul.

Guide to our unique rug at our home by recording.

Navigating three types of images, shot in three different periods, the film explores the poetics of haunting through compositions of images that create an entanglement between the past and the present. An intimate but detached voice, a little stoic even, speaking of countless losses. The repeated affirmation of belonging to a place that is no longer.

It’s October 2019, and four progressive women are documenting the uprising in Beirut. They are journalist Hanine, Iraqi camerawoman Lujain, and Noel and Michelle, two artist sisters whose often-ironic songs have made them a voice for their generation. The prevailing mood is one of hope and change. But a few months later, Covid-19 has locked down the city, and all optimism seems to have evaporated.

Based on actual events, Free Range is the story of a cow that crosses the border from Israel to Lebanon and meets 16-year-old Malakeh and her family.

The story of the film is centered around three women: virgin, lubna and emotions, each of whom had an experience with marriage, where the first wife fails and ends in divorce, the second suffers from problems with her husband after their recent marriage, and the third is looking for another wife to her husband to meet his sexual requirements that can not meet Out.

Immigration? Yes or no? In Search of a better life... Is there another way? Please wait...

One year in the life of the grand ducal family. What is everyday life like behind closed doors of the grand ducal palace? What tasks do the respective members of the grand ducal family have to fulfill, what are their engagements? How are they in truly private moments? "Kinnekskanner - One year in the life of the grand ducal family", a unique documentary.

Camille is a composer going back to his homeland Lebanon to write a song about his country. Raya is looking for her lost son. They meet, fall in love, and discover the despair of the people of war-torn Lebanon.

After September 11th, an Iraqi filmmaker living in the west spends her days at home, questioning her own life choices and sense of belonging in a world that has gone astray.