Best Lebanese documentary movies

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.

Kunsthal Charlottenborg and CPH:DOX present an exhibition with the French star artist Laure Prouvost, who will open the festival’s first day.

For 15 months, 45 inmates, some completely illiterate, worked together to present an adaptation of Reginald Rose's famous stage play 12 Angry Men.

Follows inmates from Roumieh Prison in Lebanon who produce a play about their fellow prisoners who suffer from mental illness and are thus filed under 'Mad and Possessed' by the Penal Code and forgotten behind bars for life.

When filmmaker Wael Kadlo picks up his mother from the airport in Beirut, it seems like a rather warm family visit. But Kadlo, who was born in Damascus in 1980, has some questions he needs to ask her.

Many people first became aware of the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon after the shocking and horrific Sabra-Shatila massacre that took place there in 1982. Located in Beirut's "belt of misery," the camp is home to 15,000 Palestinians and Lebanese who share a common experience of displacement, unemployment and poverty. Fifty years after the exile of their grandparents from Palestine, the children of Shatila attempt to come to terms with the reality of being refugees in a camp that has survived massacre, siege and starvation. Director Mai Masri focuses on two Palestinian children in the camp: Farah, age 11 and Issa, age 12. When these children are given video cameras, the story of the camp evolves from their personal narratives as they articulate the feelings and hopes of their generation.

Drawing on the Arab heritage of oral tradition and mosaic pattern, Leila and the Wolves is an exploration of the collective memory of Arab women and their hidden role in history throughout the past half century both in Palestine and in Lebanon.

Twelve Palestinian women sit before us and talk of their life before the Diaspora, of their memories, of their lives and of their identity. Their narratives are connected by the enduring thread of the ancient art of embroidery. Twelve resilient, determined and articulate women from disparate walks of life: lawyers, artists, housewives, activists, architects, and politicians stitch together the story of their homeland, of their dispossession, and of their unwavering determination that justice will prevail. Through their stories, the individual weaves into the collective, yet remaining distinctly personal. Twelve women, twelve life-spans, and stories from Palestine; a land whose position was fixed on the map of the world, but is now embroidered on its face.

A unique historical portrait of the Palestinian people's struggle to produce their own image. Using material long hidden in archives across the globe, the film reaches back through the modern history of Palestine and reverses decades of colonial dominance with a mosaic of struggle from the perspective of the colonized.

This hushed, pared-down essay weaves together different facts and myths surrounding the moon: images, texts, and sounds are spun into a dense, delicate tissue of ideas, with humans both at the centre and infinitely small in this celestial context.

13-year-old Khodor is a child whose family tries to issue him an ID document that proves his existence and gives him the right to education, health-care and movement outside of the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Lebanon. Through the process, many of the family's old secrets are revealed.

Amidst the popular uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011, a group of former Lebanese detainees decides to break their long-held silence about the horrific years they spent imprisoned in Tadmor (Palmyra), one of the Assad regime's most dreadful prisons. They decide to testify publicly about the systematic torture and humiliation they experienced. To reclaim and overcome this dark chapter in their lives, they rebuild Tadmor in an abandoned school near Beirut. By playing the role of both "victim" and "victimizer," they will relive their survival.

A generous and lyrical continuation of Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios’ interest in the ties between ecology, feminism, and collective organization, this documentary showcases the radical politics of a Lebanese farming cooperative and the citizens of Jinwar, a women-only village in the north of Syria.

In the late 1960s, Dhofar rose up against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, in a democratic, anti-imperialist guerrilla movement. Director Heiny Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, to reach the conflict zone and capture this rare record of a now mostly-forgotten war.

The camera wanders through streets standing witness to a war that has destroyed a city and an entire nation. Bagdadi goes to war against the Lebanese civil war, exploring different locations and situations in a country faced with its own demise. The poetic text raises questions of life and death through contrasting images of violent death and the will to live.

Through the stories of Assaad Shaftari, a former high-ranking militia officer, and Maryam Saiidi, the mother of a missing communist fighter, the film digs into war wounds and poses the question of whether or not redemption and forgiveness are possible.

Deep in the earth beneath the Norwegian permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. For the first time ever, seeds held there from a major gene bank in Aleppo are now being replicated, after its holdings were left behind when the institution had to move to Lebanon due to the civil war. It is refugees from Syria who are carrying out this painstaking work in the fields of the Beqaa Valley. In the Levant, dry conditions and the power of global agricultural corporations are the biggest challenge, while in the Arctic Circle - where the seed vault was supposed to withstand anything - it is rising temperatures and melting glaciers.

Lebanon's brief flirtation with space travel in the 1960s becomes a poignant metaphor for the Arab world's utopian dreams in this riveting documentary.

A feature length documentary exploring violence and social change through the stories of ex-fighters from the Lebanese Civil War.

An intimate chronicle of the war that devastated southern Lebanon for a year and a half.

The backstage story of one of the most successful Arab dramas in history, narrating the phases of its inception, execution, production and direction.

Rejecting all propagandistic or narrative convention, Ghazi combined documentary and abstract sequences with a series of discontinuous plot lines to organize a stinging attack on the bourgeois decadence of Beirut's political milieu.

Tribute to the Druze Kamal Jumblatt, Minister of Economy and Agriculture (1946) and founder of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) in 1949. He was one of the architects of the departure of President Bechara el-Khoury (1952), before playing a major role in the events of 1958. From 1960 to 1964, Kamal Jumblatt assumed, under the presidency of Fouad Chehab, various ministerial functions . . After the conflict of June 1967, he gradually approached the Palestinian organizations. In 1969 he became Minister of the Interior; in August 1970, he supported the election of Soleiman Frangié as President of the Republic. Following the Lebanese-Palestinian clashes of May 1973, he took sides against the head of state, established himself as the leader of the National Movement in 1975 and engaged in a revolutionary armed struggle against the Lebanese Front. Hostile to Syria's intervention in Lebanon, he broke with it (March 1976). He was assassinated near a Syrian checkpoint in 1977.

Panoptic explores Lebanon's schizophrenia. Depicting a nation thriving for modernity while ignoring the vices preventing it from achieving its goal, director Rana Eid examines this paradox through sound, iconic monuments and secret hideouts.

"Thirty-five years ago, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I knew. He has disappeared since. Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking in the street, but I wasn’t sure it was him. Parts of his face were torn off, but his features had remained unchanged since the incident. Yet something was different, as if he wasn’t the same man” (Ghassan Halwani).

In July 1982, the Israeli army besieged Beirut. Four days earlier, Jocelyne Saab sees her house burn and 150 years of family existence go up in smoke. She then takes refuge in questioning: when did this all begin? How did the Beirut people live the siege? Each place will then become a story and each name a memory.

Zeinab, 23, is a rebellious Muslim Shi’a woman who works in an association that grants micro-credit loans to people in precarious financial circumstances in the popular areas of Beirut. Each month, Zeinab is evaluated on the number of micro-credit contracts approved. For the need of her work, Zeinab browses the city aboard a grey scooter that will become pink, defying her male colleagues who, because they adopted the scooter as mode of transportation, realize higher turnover than girls.

Mahdia, Tunisia. Fatma and her daughters, Najeh and Waffeh, work as “machtat”, traditional musicians who play at wedding ceremonies. Their music evokes love and its promises, but the reality is much more complex and painful. Between illusions and disillusionment, Machtat is a powerful and liberating portrait of three women asserting their voices.

Filmmaker Trevor Graham is an Australian 'hummus tragic'. Every week in his Bondi Beach home he observes the hummus making ritual, mashing chickpeas, lemon juice, garlic and tahina. But when the Hummus War erupted in 2008, among the usual suspects, Israel, Lebanon and Palestine, Graham was hungry for more. But this war ha no soldiers, bullets or tanks. Just chickpeas and hummus. Make Hummus Not War is a humorous homage to the chickpea's most distinguished dish. But there's a personal story, how Graham became a hummus tragic, a father who served in Palestine during WW2 and two lovers in his life, one Syrian, one Jewish, with whom he shared a great culinary passion.

WINE and WAR is a documentary about one of the the oldest winemaking regions on earth and the resilience of the Lebanese entrepreneurial spirit seen through the lens of war and instability.

Ismail Shammout, an artist who is primarily known for his paintings, also served as director of the Cultural Arts Section of the PLO and worked with the organization’s Film Unit in the 1970s. In this short film, Shammout records a solidarity song by the Palestinian Egyptian singer Zeinab Shaath to announce the most urgent call of Palestine. The song and the words of Kamal Nasser that break through the ballad continue to hold striking relevance today. Lyrics by Lalitha Punjabi.

Between 1880 and 1960, hundreds of Luxembourgers went to settle in the Belgian Congo to live and work there; some for some time, others for ever. The film tells their story and their experiences.

The film follows Souha Béchara’s return to her village, Deir Mimas, to the Khiam jail, in the very place where she tried to assassinate General Lahd. For Souha, surviving hell is a joyful, thoughtful, and liberating travel diary. The diary of a trip that, for a moment, let one believe in the possible reconciliation of

“Al Makhtufun” won the 1998 Best Short Documentary Film Award at the Mediterranean Film Festival for highlighting the issue of abducted Lebanese. The film raises two major issues: The abductee’s physical absence and his spiritual presence among his family members, and the parents silently wishing his return. The documentary looks at documents kept by Wadad, a mother who decides to step outside her comfort zone and share her papers and forms when other parents would not.

After an interruption of thirty years. Christian Ghazi resumes his cinematographic work with the documentary "Coffin of the Memory". The film mixes newly shot interviews with archive images. In the interviews it sheds light on two basic issues, solitude and economic situation. Through images and simple daily situations, Christian Ghazi draws a portrait of the Lebanese society, a society drowning in its contradictions and its search for an empty individualism and the superficiality of daily consumption, that of production, ideas, time and space.

"The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs is a three-part video project: Missing Lebanese Wars (in three parts), Secrets in the Open Sea and Miraculous Beginnings (in two parts). The work investigates the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese wars (1975-1991). All parts are short fake documentaries, hysterical symptoms of sorts that present imaginary events conctructed out of innocent and everyday material. The tapes document fantastic situations that beset a number of individuals during the civil wars. The tapes do not document what happened, but what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational, sayable, and thinkable about the wars."

Tango of Yearning (1998) is the first episode of an autobiographical trilogy on postwar Lebanon, later including Nightfall (2000) and Civil War (2002). Taking its title from Tango of Hope, a classic ballad by Nur al-Huda, the film draws from the director’s reflections on war, love, and cinema, as well as his personal experience at the public television channel TéléLiban. Conjuring various snippets of audiovisual archival material, the film is a poetic elegy to film, Beirut’s movie theaters, and a city undergoing radical transformation. Mohamed Soueid has long been a proponent of the experimental video documentary movement in Lebanon, playing a significant role in the country’s creative renaissance since the end of the civil war. Originally trained as a news videographer during the war, the experience offered him a facility with the medium, which he further developed by making non-linear documentary films with a distinctly personal take.

A short film made by Vladimir Tamari following the first anniversary of the occupation of Arab Jerusalem by the Israeli army at the start of the Arab Israeli War on June 5, 1967. Using footage from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) cinema archives where he worked as a technician, Tamari edited this film and organized its narration and addition of music by his friends, all volunteers and amateurs as he was, in order to express the feelings of the Palestinians at the loss of their capital city and center of their spiritual, commercial and intellectual life.

A short documentary that tells the stories of Masrou’ Leila, a Lebanese rock band with an outspoken gay singer, and Sarah Hegazy, an Egyptian activist. Both parties have experienced oppression because of their sexual orientation and beliefs. The film shows what it’s like for the LGBTQIA+ community to be oppressed and threatened by the governments in the Middle East.

From their 'Purple House' in the South of Lebanon, French-Iraqi director Abbas Fahdel and his Lebanese wife, the painter Nour Ballouk, start exploring a multifaceted country that seems to be on the edge of the abyss.

In 1970, Christian Ghazi and Noureddine Chatti met with a number of Arab political figures, especially Palestinians residing in Lebanon, resulting in this piece of armed (alternative or third) cinema that captures a crucial cross-section of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon in 1970. The film features footage of Ghassan Kanafani, Sadiq Jalal El-Azm, Nabil Shaath and other personalities who share their vision of the Palestinian revolution, tracing its history back to the early 20th century. These testimonies describe the numerous strikes and popular protests that took place in Palestine under the Ottoman occupation, followed by the British colonization and the settlement of the Jewish state in 1948. They enumerate the objectives of the struggle, emphasising the necessity for a free and democratic Palestine, defended through armed or non-armed struggle by all its citizens, men and women of various affiliations.

When Leila, a young doctor, returns to her village in south Lebanon, she finds it badly damaged after the 1993 Israeli attack. Israeli bombing during this episode razed 50 villages and left half a million civilians homeless, causing a flood of refugees into Beirut. Many of those who fled south Lebanon have not returned, choosing instead to live a scavenging existence in bombed-out buildings in the capital, where they’re out of range of the Israeli-occupied “security zone” in the south. Through Leila’s relationship with her family and the women and children of the surrounding villages, we get to know the hopes and dreams of the people who have remained in south Lebanon as they work to rebuild their homes and their lives.

A series of vibrant drawings painted by Palestinian children are brought to life in Blown By the Wind. The montaged still images glimpse at their everyday lives, their memories and imagination following the Six Day War in 1967.

Is it possible to talk about death in war time? This question is exposed through four people who lost friends and relatives in four different Lebanese regions.

Following the operation against the Israeli sports delegation participating in the Munich Olympics in Germany in 1972, the Zionist entity launched retaliatory raids against the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon (specifically the village of Da'al in Syria and the Nabatieh camp in Lebanon) on September 8th, 1972. In reflecting the sheer barbarism of the Zionist aggression, legendary Palestinian filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali is compelled to reach for new filmic grammar to reflect on the brutality. This is a film haunted and haunting, with unfiltered images of death. Lifeless babies, features bloated. Children in hospital beds, limbs twisted, faces bruised. Agony. Skulls shattered. Hands crushed. Occasionally, lifeless eyes blink, a twitch of the hand brings something akin to hope – that life persists, life could persist.

"The Story of a Village and a War" is a film about the citizens of South Lebanon during the israeli invasion in 1978. The film highlights their daily suffering during the occupation. It was shown at the United Nations at the request of Ghassan Tueini, the representative of Lebanon back then. The screening helped in the issuance of resolution 425, which provided for the withdrawal of the israeli occupation from the South.