1000 and 1000 Nights
Hady Zaccak
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"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." |
A Feeling Greater Than Love (Shu'our akbar min el hob)
Mary Jirmanus Saba
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Revisits the strikes of tobacco and chocolate factory workers in early-1970s Lebanon, a forgotten moment of social struggle that the civil war erased from collective memory. Former activists and archive footage reconstruct it. |
A History Lesson (Dars fi al-tarikh)
Hady Zaccak
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Five ninth-graders in Christian, Muslim and secular schools learn from the same official history textbook, yet disagree on Lebanon's enemies, allies and key dates. The unified history curriculum promised by the Taif Agreement was never implemented. |
A Perfect Day (Yawmoun akhar)
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige
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A mother and son must decide whether to have her husband, missing for fifteen years, declared legally dead; one day in a Beirut where the disappeared still weigh on everyone. |
A Time to Rest (Hudna)
Myriam El Hajj
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The director films her uncle Riad, a gun-shop owner, and other relatives who fought in a Christian militia; for some of them the war years remain the best of their lives. |
About a War
Daniele Rugo, Abi Weaver
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82-minute documentary built on the testimonies of three former fighters (a Lebanese Forces intelligence officer, a Palestinian fighter and a Communist commander) on why they joined, what they did and the silence that followed. |
Ahlam al-Manfa: Frontiers of Dreams and Fears
Mai Masri
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"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." |
Ashoura: This Blood Spilled In My Veins
Jalal Toufic
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"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." |
Augurs (Augures)
Chrystèle Khodr
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Actresses Hanane Hajj Ali and Randa Asmar recall their work in Beirut theatres between 1980 and 1991, piecing together the divided city from the stage. |
Beirut Bereft: The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict
Ziad Antar, Rasha Salti
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Photographs of 57 unfinished or abandoned Beirut buildings, many halted by the war and later used by militias, shot on expired film and paired with a text by Rasha Salti. |
Beirut Caoutchouc
Marwan Rechmaoui
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Walk-on rubber floor map of Beirut made of sixty pieces corresponding to the city's quarters, showing streets but not the civil-war demarcation lines, and raising questions about how the city is divided. |
Beirut City Centre (Beyrouth centre-ville)
Fouad Elkoury
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Photographic commission organised by Dominique Eddé to record the ruined downtown of Beirut in 1991, before its demolition and reconstruction; a key visual record of the war's end. With Raymond Depardon, Gabriele Basilico, René Burri, Josef Koudelka and Robert Frank. |
Blue Night
Fouad Alywan
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"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…" |
Children of Fire
Mai Masri
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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. |
Children of Shatila
Mai Masri
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"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. |
China (Yassin Dynasty)
Raed Yassin
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Porcelain vases made with craftsmen in Jingdezhen, China, each painted with a battle of the 1975–1990 war as described by former fighters, turning war memory into a decorative heirloom. |
Civil War
Mohamad Soueid
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"A critique of Western representations of the Middle East, Arab Culture, and the Palestinian people." |
Civilisées
Randa Chahal Sabbag
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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
Jalal Toufic
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"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." |
Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano
Cyril Aris
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Weeks after the port explosion, the crew of Costa Brava, Lebanon must decide whether to go on filming in a wrecked city; a film about making art inside a disaster. |
Daresalam
Georges Issa Coelo
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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. |
De la séduction
Ghassan Salhab, Nesrine Khodr
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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. |
Diaries from Lebanon
Myriam El Hajj
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From the 2018 elections through the 2019 uprising, the pandemic and the port explosion, the film follows civil-war veteran Georges Moufarrej, writer Joumana Haddad and activist Perla Joe Maalouli, three generations disputing how Lebanon's story should be told. |
Do You Love Me
Lana Daher
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Built entirely from seventy years of fiction films, newsreels, TV, home movies, photographs and songs, it assembles a memory of Lebanon in the absence of any national archive. |
El-Aassar (The Tornado)
Samir Habchi
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" . . 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." |
Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible
Ghassan Halwani
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An essay-documentary on the thousands of people who disappeared during the civil war. Halwani scrapes away layers of posters on Beirut walls and uses painstaking animation to make the faces of the missing reappear. |
Green Line (Ligne verte)
Sylvie Ballyot
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Fida Bizri, who grew up in wartime Beirut, uses figurines and models to ask former fighters from different sides to explain the war she lived through as a child. |
Heaven Sent (Tombé du ciel)
Wissam Charaf
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Samir, a militiaman presumed dead, reappears twenty years later in the life of his younger brother, now a bodyguard, and must find his way in a city that changed without him. A deadpan comedy about the war's leftovers. |
Heavens
Zoukak Theatre Company
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A chorus of three women on collective and individual memory of the war, the missing and the 1991 amnesty law; it closes Zoukak's research cycle begun with Perform-Autopsy. |
Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (Houna wa rubbama hounak)
Lamia Joreige
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Walking along the former Green Line, Joreige asks residents whether they know anyone who was kidnapped there during the war; archive photos of checkpoints are cut against present-day streets. |
Here Comes the Rain (Chatti ya dini)
Bahij Hojeij
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Ramez, kidnapped during the war, is suddenly released after twenty years and returns to a family and city that have learned to live without him. |
Hostage of Time
Jean Khalil Chamoun
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"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... " |
How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool's Joke
Rabih Mroué, Fadi Toufic
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Four former fighters from rival militias sit on a sofa beneath their own martyr posters and recount, contradicting one another, their deaths and returns from 1975 to 2007. |
I Want to See (Je veux voir)
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige
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Catherine Deneuve, playing herself, asks to see the damage of the 2006 war and is driven to the south by Rabih Mroué; a film on what images can and cannot show. |
In the Shadows of the City (Taif al-madina)
Jean Chamoun
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A boy from the south comes to Beirut, is drawn into a militia during the war and later searches for his kidnapped father; Chamoun mixes fiction with his own documentary footage from 1975 to the post-war years. |
In This House (Fi hatha al-bayt)
Akram Zaatari
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Zaatari digs up the letter a resistance fighter buried in a mortar shell in the garden of a south Lebanese house he occupied, watched by uneasy neighbours and intelligence officers. |
Introduction to the End of an Argument
Jayce Salloum, Elia Suleiman
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A critique of Western representations of the Middle East, Arab Culture, and the Palestinian people." |
Khiam 2000-2007
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige
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Six former detainees of the Khiam prison, run by Israel and its proxy militia in south Lebanon, talk about survival and the objects they made in captivity; filmed in 2000, then again after the camp was destroyed in the 2006 war. |
La Maison Rose
Joana Hadji Thomas, Khalil Joreige
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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. |
Lasting Images (Images rémanentes)
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige
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An undeveloped Super 8 reel left by Khalil Joreige's uncle, kidnapped in 1985 and still missing, is developed fifteen years later; only faint ghostly images surface from the white film. |
Letter to a Refusing Pilot
Akram Zaatari
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Starts from a 1982 rumour in Saida that an Israeli pilot refused to bomb a school (the one founded by Zaatari's father) and dropped his bombs at sea; the pilot turned out to be real. |
Liban Bout à Bout
Olga Nakkas
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"Portrait of several generations of Lebanese women wondering how to rebuild their country and their future in the search for an impossible Lebanese identity." |
Mabrouk Again
Hani Tamba
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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. |
Massaker
Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen
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Six former Lebanese Forces militiamen who took part in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre describe, faces hidden, what they did and how they were made into killers. A rare film built entirely on perpetrators' testimony. |
Memories for a Private Eye
Rania Stephan
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Through the detective of Preminger's Laura, Stephan investigates the only moving image of her dead mother and the war's effect on her family. First chapter of a trilogy on her personal archive. |
Memory Box
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige
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In Montreal, a teenager secretly opens a box of the notebooks, cassettes and photographs her mother sent from 1980s Beirut, and discovers her mother's war-time youth. |
Miguel's War
Eliane Raheb
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A gay Lebanese man who has lived in Spain for decades as 'Miguel' returns, with the director, to the childhood traumas, the civil war he fought in and the family that drove him away. Re-enactments, animation and archive are used to take a personal history apart. |
Missing Lebanese Wars
Walid Raad
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"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." |
Nightfall (Ma hataf li al-masa')
Mohamed Soueid
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Soueid returns to his diaries and to his former comrades of the Fatah-linked 'Student Squad' during the civil war, looking at what is left of their commitment. |
no title
Ghassan Salhab
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Medium-length film shot from a car driving through the ruins of Beirut's southern suburbs and South Lebanon during the lull after the November 2024 ceasefire. |
