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1-24 of 24
- Talal Derki returns to his homeland where he gains the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years.
- An intimate, and often humorous, portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive, and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family in the lives of those for whom dispossession is the norm, and yearning their daily lives.
- Amal is fourteen years old when she goes to Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring to showcase. With youthful hubris she goes straight to the danger. This coming of age film follows her in the years that follow, a period in which the fearless Amal seeks her own identity in a country in transition.
- A filmmaker watches an archive of films from the period of the Palestinian revolution...
- A poetic documentary that puts a feisty Beiruti grandmother at the center of brave film exercises designed to commemorate her many worlds before they are erased by the passage of time and her eventual death. With great intimacy, the film documents the larger-than-life character Teta Fatima as she struggles to cope with the silence of her once-buzzing house and imagines what awaits her beyond death. Meanwhile, the features of her beloved violinist husband (deceased 20 years) manifest through the face of their filmmaker grandson while his previously unpublished violin improvisations weave through her world and that of the film. It brings together grandfather, grandmother and grandson in a magic-realist documentary that aims to defy a past death and a future one.
- 1974. Lebanon is in intellectual, cultural and political ferment. Between March and April, for 37 days, a few students from the American University of Beirut occupy the university's premises to protest against rising tuition fees. 2011: in the midst of the Arab Spring, Rania and Raed Rafei decide to step back and reconsider today's situation in the light of that period which was pregnant with hope, but also a prelude to civil war. Should they revive the past? Recall it? Reconstruct it? That's a crucial question. Here the method is decisive. First, make meticulous research. Then launch the experiment, as the film doesn't only reread past events, but also searches for their echo in today's time. Thus yesterday's protagonists are portrayed by their likely modern counterparts, political actors involved in present struggles. What is democracy today, and how can we fight? A few guidelines, a few emblematic accessories as so many signs (a picture of Che Guevara, a megaphone) and here they go, launching into an experiment based on improvisation, in which a form of theatricality accentuated by the enclosed setting interact with cinema. And in this dialectic of past and present, memories go around as freely as words in present time, just like in the interviews which punctuate the film - yesterday's and today's words getting inextricably mixed.
- A visceral Road Movie that chronicles the daily travails of Palestinians of all backgrounds as they seek routes through, under, around, and over a bewildering matrix of barriers.
- A young Egyptian filmmaker recounts his interaction with a group of plainclothes policemen while grappling with issues of guilt and morality.
- Imagine that your father is a Palestinian, and he had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Imagine that you have siblings, and you cannot talk to them because you do not speak the same language. Imagine that you have a family, but you were raised without parents... The film reveals the extraordinary story of a Palestinian family.
- A woman takes a first time journey back to her Palestine. Accompanied by Hasan, her imaginary lover, she searches for his fantasy world and finds the remnants of hope in a land exhausted by endless year
- In one of the poorest neighborhoods of Cairo, the community is the only way for hope.
- They are a group of marginalized young men known as the "thugs of Al Lija" neighborhood. A mysterious world which carries within its folds the particular complexities of social and political realities in Lebanon is revealed.
- Through the hubbub of a revolution, "It was better tomorrow" follows Aida, a Tunisian woman who has to rebuild her entire life and who does not wish to look backwards. She spends her time moving from one poor neighborhood to another. Driven by the will to find a roof over her head and for her children, she takes no notice of the historical events taking place around her. Her only goal is to find a way out and she is convinced that the revolution is a blessing. "It was better tomorrow" shows the atypical journey of this brazen and bold woman in the intense interval of a country's revolution.
- They were young, loved adventures and had choices. In the 1960s and 70s thousands of young Lebanese left their villages and searched for a new life in the city - as countless like-minded people around the globe. The port of Beirut, the city's economic lung and central urban district, provided work for truck drivers - a job that stressed masculinity and became a lifestyle. The income allowed the young men to participate in the vibrant urban life, to enjoy their time at the always busy Burj Square with its many cinemas and restaurants as well as to start families. During the years of the civil war (1975-90) the drivers were needed to maintain the supply of food, goods, and sometime weapons between the divided sectors of country. Some were humble, others were heroic, yet all were adventurous and felt free. After the war ended the once popular Burj Square, the city's centre, was demolished, privatized and rebuild for the affluent. Lebanese economy was reorganized, thus globalized. Today fancy restaurants in the new downtown charge in Dollar and sometimes in Euro. The truck drivers' universe shrunk to the port where they offer their skills as day laborers now. Yet mostly they kill time and take long journeys in memory. One of them, Najm El Habre, is too sick to join his friends. He found a different way to carry on.
- Based on the main events in Lebanon since the end of civil war. "All this and more" is a journey through the video images produced by modern Lebanon, a country torn between the delight of senses, warrior's messages and amnesia.
- An elderly Palestinian couple has a final standoff against Israeli authorities to maintain their natural lifestyle in Roshmia; last natural valley in Haifa.
- For over seventy years, Elie Sfeir has worked as a barber in Beirut at some of the country's most exclusive and refined salons a fascinating portrait of a man who, over the years.
- A dialogue between two generations. A dialogue to explore the past and the present. The nostalgia of an era that is absent now yet some members of this time still exist . The subject of the film is a feeling. The feeling of loss and disappearance. Of a time that existed and now only the almost invisible remnants exist.
- Zuhdi Al Adawi, a Palestinian artist imprisoned in the occupied territories, uses his art as his means of expression and is helped by the rest of the community and his own family to accomplish his artwork.
- Nashaat is a Palestinian fighter who was killed by the Israelis in 1982. When Aseel, Nashaat's nephew, comes across a fact that makes him doubt the circumstances of his uncle's death, he embarks on a quest to find the truth. Not only does this quest lead him to disturbing facts, but it also makes him understand the real reasons behind his broken relationship with his father during his childhood.
- Filmed over a period of ten years, Dance with a Bullet is about the personal story of a 27-year old Iraqi male dancer named Anmar Taha, his survival after being shot in Baghdad by Muslim extremists in 2006 and the new life he built up for himself after fleeing to Sweden. Anmar's close friend - the filmmaker - narrates.
- A documentary filmed in the controversial labor camps of the United Arab Emirates. The film follows a massive Bollywood singing and trivia competition that searches across 70 labor camps throughout the country to find and crown the champ of all camps. The film alternates between music trivia competition and the gritty reality of a drab life lived by the laborers, while weaving in intimate scenes of their daily routines and emotional reflections on their life as laborers in Dubai. Narrated (and sung) often in the voices of the laborers, it paints a complete portrait of this vast and isolated population of men who come to build the dream cities of the Arab world while supporting their societies and economies back home in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
- Mohamed Amine Bouhrizi alias Madou MC, an older generation underground rapper from Tunis, seeks the balance and stability through the paradoxes and contradictions of the life in the space of his native district "The Kabbaria".