In 1975, the Lebanese wars started when Maroun Bagdadi ended his first feature film "Beirutya Beirut". Did the war give an identity to Lebanese cinema? Productions of documentaries, action movies, actor films, co-productions, and emigration. Since 1975, the war has remained a major subject for...
In 1975, a group of young Lebanese men joined the Palestinian organization “Fateh”. Known as the “Student Brigade”, they took part in the Lebanese Civil War. Some of them were killed, others left the country. Following the Israeli invasion in 1982, Palestinian armed forces left Lebanon....
Cinema Fouad is a documentary portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman living in Beirut, where she earns a living as a domestic worker and belly dancer. Soueid shows us scenes of El Kurdi’s domestic world: eating, applying make-up, dancing in her bedroom, all while reflecting on her life...
A remarkable mock-doc that profoundly explores Lebanon's turbulent history through the life and times of a reclusive metal automaton that once was emblematic of the country's hopes and dreams.
A history of Lebanon’s Shiites, based on personal writings and memoirs. The film retraces the twelfth sect’s journey through Jabal Amel, the Bekaa Valley, Mount Lebanon and Beirut, while while exploring the major events and factors that influenced a people’s existence.
To deal with his insomnia, Mohamed Soueid meets various people and close friends to ask them to tell him stories that could help him get a good night's sleep. After filming for 15 years, the collected rushes have become a film, a series of dreams that have come true and haunted the filmmaker until...
A yearning in an unsettled space that, once, was shared and breathed by two cineastes, living in two different cities, trying to sustain their longing through each other’s scattered images, sounds, and monologues, pieced together in one film, one dialogue, one soul flown away by loneliness and...
In The Sky Is Not Always Above, Beirut’s southern suburbs, notorious as a staunch Hezbollah stronghold, are at once a high-security zone, a site of exception vis-a-vis the writ of Lebanese government, and a recurring target for the Israeli army’s warplanes. Shot after the devastating Israeli...
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.
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...
A son pieces together his father’s revolutionary past from the diary he’s found, painting a portrait of fathers and sons who were revolutionaries during the 1970s. Most interestingly, the film sheds light on the contrast between the lives of men who ached to change the world vs the men who now...
After twenty years of absence, the filmmaker returns to his home town of Ras Baalbeck, Lebanon to remember the life of his grandfather, who had moved there from Homs, Syria many years before.
Mohamed D'abis worked as an assistant director and technician for many independent Lebanese filmmakers. In the winter of 2000, he left his home and never came back. His body was found months later inside an abandoned war-damaged building in Beirut. In this documentary, director Mohamed Soueid...
A series of experimental short clips that Mohamed Soueid directed while part of the team of TéléLiban, Lebanon’s main public television channel. Initially intended as a special filler program on food and scheduled to be aired during Ramadan in 1994, these 34 films, each five minutes, were...
In How Bitter Is My Sweet, six characters, two cities, many homelands, the bitter and the sweet of overcoming life’s hardships, are told by everyday people who dwell at the fringes of society and the informal economy. Fragmented and tender, this film is Soueid’s free-style poetic ode to the...
