Film references

"Sindbad and Ali Baba help Aladdin retrieve his stolen lamp from an Israeli soldier, in a recount of the Israeli-Arab conflict within an Arabian Nights context."

"The lives of two young Palestinians through several months of their lives in the Shatila refugee camp and Bethlehem's al-Dhaysha refugee camp; their extraordinary journey to the borders of exile separating them from their homeland and from each other."

"Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the son of the first Shi‘ite imam, ‘Alî, was slaughtered alongside many members of his family in the desert in 680. This memory is torture to me. But, basically, one can say this memory is torture to me of every memory, since each reminiscence envelops at some level the memory of the origin of memory, the torture had to be inflicted on humans in order to make them remember (Nietzsche). The memory that the yearly commemoration of ‘Âshûrâ’ is trying to maintain is not only or mainly that of the past, but the memory of the future, namely the promise of the Parousia of the twelfth imam, the long-awaited Mahdî—notwithstanding the passage of a millennium since his occultation—as well as the corresponding promise of Duodeciman Shi‘ites to wait for him. ‘Âshûrâ’: A Condition of Possibility of an Unconditional Promise."

"A Lebanese author attempts to brush away the raging civil war outside by covering his entire home with blue paint and spending a night to remember with his wife and daughter…"

Intimate portraits of a five year old boy and an eleven year old girl in Nablus give a personal perspective to the Palestinian intifada. The film maker, Mai Masri, is originally from Nablus.

"Fifty years after the exile of their grandparents from Palestine, the children of Shatila camp attempt to come to terms with the realities of being refugees in a camp which has survived massacre, siege and starvation."
Two Palestinian children -given video cameras- express the realities of their daily lives and their history.

"A critique of Western representations of the Middle East, Arab Culture, and the Palestinian people."

Randa Chahal Sabbag says about her film: "My film shows men in war, and above-all Libyans themselves, become more human." "It's the first time that someone said to the Lebanese: if you had not fought this war, not the Syrians nor the Israels ... It's our fault, if there had been 200 000 deaths and 600 000 wounded. The Lebanese are warriors in spirit, they love weapons. This is what I've shown, at the same time as the absurdity of this war."

"Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green registers the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster (the fifteen-year Lebanese war); produces completed crossword puzzles with subsisting blank spaces in a country of shattered shop signs; exhibits the rise in 1992-Beirut of a sublime architecture of bricks in a period where it appears Arabs are being driven to the Stone Age (Palestinians throwing stones at the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories, etc.); and uses fiction to document the eruption of psychotic effects in and outside mental hospitals."

In villages, peasants and workers start a civil war to fight against a blood-thirsty and autocratic authority; each group end up creating their own rebellion throughout which 2 friends will gradually come against each other.

Lebanese women of different generations, all marked by the war, discuss desire, seduction and love; showing a feeling of urgency, of wasted time they need to make up for, and time they must not waste.

" . . a film about the Lebanese civil war on location, filmed with the help of the Lebanese government, The Tornado narrates the story of a young Lebanese student on a visit home from the Soviet Union. While initially alienated by the war, he quickly finds himself an active participant."

"Tarek is a cab driver in Beirut. When one day a customer wants Tarek to drive him to a loony-bin, the Oisellerie, it is the beginning of an adventure... "

A critique of Western representations of the Middle East, Arab Culture, and the Palestinian people."

Facing the ruins of a strange post-war period, the individual and collective struggles to regain memory; through the humorous account of the story of a group of Lebanese refugees who settled in a disused pink palace during the war and who have to fight against a promoter who wants to make a commercial center of it.

"Portrait of several generations of Lebanese women wondering how to rebuild their country and their future in the search for an impossible Lebanese identity."

In post-war Beirut, Hoda "re-makes" her wedding ceremony in order to please her mother who has no photograph of the event because it had happened during the war.

"The possibilities and limits of writing the history of the Lebanese Civil War considering it not only as an established chronology of events, dates, personalities, massacres, and invasions, but also as an abstraction constituted by various discourses and, more importantly for Dr. Fakhouri -the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon-, out of his notebooks, various modes of assimilating the data of the world."

Remembering Lebanon during its 20 years of war through the experience of the author's mother, sister and brother; Beirut's post-war Trauma throughout the "amnesia of reconstruction".

Post-war Lebanon, throughout the reconstruction of Beirut; traumatized lives because of the civil conflict - on-site interviews with men who used to be fighters-, the silence due to post-war amnesia, and the collective refusal of the victims to acknowledge and punish those responsible for the war.

With a sense of hope for the future - both her own and that of Lebanon-, Souha Beshara shares In this video-documentary, her story about her ten years' imprisonment in the Khiam prison -6 of which were in solitary confinement- for the attempt on the life of Lebanese General Antoine Lahad who was collaborating with the Israeli Army in the South of Lebanon.

"The stories of four people as they attempt to reconstruct their lives after a long devastating civil war: two ex-militia fighters from Beirut, a woman searching for her husband and a playwright from Southern Lebanon."

"Tarek is a cab driver in Beirut. When one day a customer wants Tarek to drive him to a loony-bin, the Oisellerie, it is the beginning of an adventure... "

Based on false documentaries, this film is an attempt to analyze the problems inherent to all historical, sociological and anthropological representations; particularly those relative to the Lebanese Civil War.

"The organic dying of a (resurrectable) human is as nothing compared to that of an animal, exemplarily of a bull in a corrida; the only phenomenon that equals in intensity the death of a bull in a corrida or of a cow in a slaughterhouse is the resurrection of a human, Lazarus coming out from the grave. The living woman in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is found settling her pillow to sleep when she encounters the undead. Why are you settling the pillow, why are you so sleepy? What disclosure are you thus trying to elude? “Tell you all,” Lazarus says in Eliot’s poem, and would that “all” not also include himself? Did Lazarus come back to tell himself about death? And did he find himself sleeping then?"

An attempt to make some sense out of 200 hours of "found" film material shot in Lebanon in 1992, highlighting the difficult, often impossible, process of making a film about a constantly reconstructed Lebanon.

"Waiting for news of their sons from the war front, two women see in the distance a man in black coming towards their terrace. Will he bring news from the front? . . Whose son is it this time?"

An attempt at telling the real story of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as it affected Beirut; traumatizing the city and its people.

"Soha Bechara, a former Lebanese resistance fighter, recently released from 10 years of captivity at the infamous Israeli " El-Khiam" detention centre, in South Lebanon, speaks of her experiences from her cell-like room in Paris."

The Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon and the powerful social, intellectual and popular resistance to this occupation; highlighting conceptions such as the land, culture, and identity in relation to both the East and the West.

the life experiences of three generations of young people as they struggle to survive in war-torn Beirut.

The poignant stories of women who played a crucial role in fighting the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon.