Jean Chamoun and Mai Masri link the stories of four people who are attempting to reconstruct their lives after Lebanon's long and devastating civil war. The film features two ex-militia fighters from Beirut; a woman searching for her missing husband; a playwright from southern Lebanon. Each share their lives and hardships amidst the rubble of their war-torn homeland.
The population of Saraqeb in Syria expresses the ongoing misery in their country and the changes after the revolution through graffiti. The walls are the basis for their existence, providing protection from outside violence. They also bear the names of martyrs, common expressions, poetry, revolutionary slogans and other graffiti. The documentary Lovers' Notebooks was shot over three years and is the first film by Saraqeb inhabitant and media activist Eyad Aljarod who directed it with Canadian-Syrian Aliaa Khachouk. The film reveals the constant tension between the revolt-sparked energy and a sense of despair, between leaving a place and the decision to return, between the euphoria about the beauty of an image and the fear of war. During the film and during the night, the walls of Saraqeb are filled with text like a lover's notebook.
A tale of national identity and the meaning of territory in Lebanon. Narrated from a first-person perspective, it focuses on a country defined by religion, whose communities are fearful of demographic partition.
Short film about the politics of measuring.
Smile, and the World Will Smile Back”, a documentary film by the al-Haddad family of Hebron made in collaboration with Ehab Tarabieh and Yoav Gross – volunteer photographers in B'Tselem's camera project and filmmakers, respectively – is to be screened as part of the short film competition at the Berlinale International Film Festival. The film documents one winter’s night at the al-Haddad home in the Palestinian town of Hebron. A group of soldiers arrives for a routine night search there, for reasons unknown to the family. Diaa and Shatha al-Hadaad, brother and sister, pick up the home video camera and record the events as they unfold throughout the night. The soldiers force Diaa to stand facing a wall, saying they won’t leave unless he stops smiling.
The story of a father and aspects of his life after going through a painful family crisis, where events intertwine between legal decisions (such as visitation law), psychological conflicts, and complex relationships between family members in contemporary society.
Lawyer Samir suddenly finds himself in the matrimonial court to face a storm of successive crises. He engages in legal conflicts and complex personalities, trying to put his life back together after separation, proving that the most difficult case that a person may plead is his own personal case against his new reality.
After Hisham, a traditional pharmacist, and Noura, an aspiring singer, get divorced, fate makes them neighbours. On the frontline of the chaos stand their mums, wielding their fiercest weapons: social media channels.
In a dramatic setting, the work deals with the story of a judge whose life is endangered due to a sensitive incident he goes through, which witnesses transformations and developments that affect the course of his entire life.
Using a vocal religious poetry recitation from old television archives mixed with a video game soundtrack, the camera in Divine Memory (2019) follows several octopuses swimming nonchalantly in water, while artificially distorting their colors. A kind of music video attuned to natural phenomena; the work attempts to delve into our innate memory as creatures of this world, perhaps a pre-human genetic memory, so as to stimulate feelings of awe and wonder at the construction of being.
