It’s becoming increasingly common for filmmakers to use the houses and neighbourhoods of destroyed and displaced Syrian towns and cities as locations for films sponsored and encouraged by the Syrian regime and its allies.   After being granted permission by the military authorities controlling these neighbourhoods, they become sets for a wide range of filmmakers who burst with their film crews into those places with their cameras, ignoring the raw recent memories of a place; the sanctity of homes; the stories, lives and memories of their inhabitants. Instead, they are committed to complete silence or a scandalous impartiality about the reasons these... more

Saeed is a young cinema passionate trying to teach the youth in Eastern Ghouta in Syria the rules of filming, but the reality they face is much harsher to respect any rule. His friend Milad is on the other side of the fence, in Damascus, under the control of the regime finishing his studies in Fine Arts. At one point, Milad decides to leave the capital and joins Saeed in under sieged Douma where they set up a local radio station and a recording studio. They hold the camera to film everything until one day the camera films them…

It has been seven years since demonstrators in downtown Cairo first cried out to demand the fall of the regime. The city was both background and witness to this event. It is a witness to the individual’s disappearance within a tsunami of crowds, and the capacity for memory seems to serve as a reel of film, capable of recording millions of hours in endless detail. The truth was timeless, embroiled in spontaneous chanting: “The people want to overthrow the regime.”   In the first moments of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, no one was concerned with documenting what was going on,... more

Link to the article: here   DOHA: In 2012 a young Tunisian woman went to a nightclub to party with some friends. There she met a young man and they eventually left together. Later three policemen found the couple kissing and, after extorting money from him, the three found it fit to rape her repeatedly.Traumatized, the young woman struggled to have doctors document her attackers’ semen so she could press charges. She persisted on this course throughout the night, despite the personal indifference and institutional obstacles she encountered. This incident from early in Tunis’ revolution is fictionalized in Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2017 feature... more

  The horizon splits the frame, a third of which unfolds destroyed cement buildings and then merges into the ruins. In the remaining two-thirds, purple-tinted clouds sink in the buildings immersed in black. The frame follows a path that leads to the destroyed buildings. From the depth of the ruins, a woman emerges. She’s wearing a black coat and a patterned veil and holding a bouquet of chrysanthemums. In slow steps, she proceeds to place the bouquet on a mound of ruins. She turns to the frame and says: The war is over.   It’s holiday. The ads of the film fill up... more

  Seven-thirty exactly   The camp’s streets lie utterly bare, nothing relieving the loneliness of these ruined walls piled one atop the other like books tossed down unread. The plants that have sprouted and grown in the middle of the road, they made the place more desolated, like some additional sign that much time has passed since anyone last came here. Even the cats have abandoned this street.   In the distance the sun makes its daily drop to the horizon.   A last ray lights the scattered dust of this arid sunset. The place is wrapped in a deep silence disturbed only by the buzzing... more

After its pioneer role in defense of Arab cinema, the festival and Beirut DC are both witnessing a progress in Arab film production and the essence of an Arab cinema that is still stuck in its beginnings, but discovering itself in new lands and possibly witnessing for the first time the support of Arab funds. Beirut DC, whose activities have reached an advanced position, proving its role in the independent Arab cinema field, from workshops to co-producing films, organizing Arab Film Weeks and helping in Arab film promotion, are the days for Beirut's cinephiles. Film categories accepted Feature length documentary Experimental Animation Short movies All Films... more