15 mins | Lebanon/US | 2021

A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing by the ruins." The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring capitalist and colonial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, archives and ruins, histories of sex, and histories of empire, all commingle in this essay film. What transpires is a web of visible and invisible threads where homosexuality in the Middle East today seems to be enmeshed.

Learn more about the film here and watch the trailer here.

Read an essay related to the film on the Visible Evidence Forum page.

Watch the full film on the Cryptofiction film platform.

Al-Atlal received an honorable mention at the 32nd Onion City Festival for experimental film and video in Chicago in April 2022.

Al-Atlal screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) as part of the Festival of (In)appropriation. The screening was followed by a conversation with the filmmakers.

Al-Atlal was acquired by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in October 2023 and is now part of the museum’s films & videos collection.

19 mins | Lebanon | 2017

Salam is a docufiction that retraces the ordinary afternoon of a working woman in the intimacy of her home. While carrying out household chores, Salam reveals the tumultuous journey of discovering her sexuality in a traditional society. Based on a six-hour-long interview with an anonymous Syrian woman, the film exposes the complex dynamics between desire and patriarchal power structures.

Salam won the prize for the best international short film at the Fribourg International Film Festival in 2017.

Watch the trailer here.

68 mins | Lebanon | 2017

Two men, two contrasting realities, and a quest for a shared future despite a world of physical and imaginary boundaries.

Eccomi ... Eccoti is a road-trip documentary that explores the depths of a transnational gay relationship in today's world. Set between Lebanon and Italy, this essay film is a poetic collage of fragments from a personal archive of shared moments: still travel photos, ambient sounds, and videos of everyday instances. Through conversations between the filmmaker and his partner, this film raises questions of love, commitment, familial trauma, European border restrictions, LGBT rights, and ongoing persecution all within the contours of a shimmering queer utopia.

Eccomi ... Eccoti is discussed in Viola Shafik’s new book, Resistance, Dissidence, Revolution: Documentary Film Esthetics in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge Studies in Middle East Film and Media, 2023).

“The film’s entire rhythm is based on shifting times and atmospheres; the spatial coming and going between Lebanon and Italy, outdoors and interiors, He and Me. In the course of these changes and exchanges, painful biographical details on both sides gradually appear; among other things, these recall the difficult relationship of both protagonists to their parents vis-à-vis their own deviation from the heterosexual norm and the emergence of their ‘queerness.’” (p. 238)

Eccomi ... Eccoti screened at film festivals in the United States, The Netherlands, Germany, and other places. Learn more about the film here.

Watch the trailer here.

The film is available on DVD here and is streaming on sooner or Amazon Prime with subtitles in English, Deutsch, Français, Polski, Svenska.

Watch a Q&A about the film after a screening hosted by Oyoun Berlin in May 2020.

Watch a Q&A about the film after its screening in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater in 2017.

95 mins | Lebanon | 2012

74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) is the first feature film I co-wrote and co-directed with Rania Rafei in 2012. This award-winning docu-drama revisits a student uprising from the 1970s against an increase in tuition fees. In 1974, the students of the American University of Beirut occupied university offices for 37 days protesting American imperialism in the Middle East and calling for the democratization of education and social justice.

Recalling this event, the film tackles the core issues of revolution and democracy with an eye on the recent changes that swept through the Arab region.

The film uses re-enactments and theatrical improvisations giving voice to young activists to embody the successes and failures of the leftist movement of the 1970s.

“It is a beautiful film, the characters bathed in light, the camerawork expressive, the performances passionate.” Laura U. Marks, Hanan al-Cinema: Affectations for the Moving Image.

More info here. Watch the trailer here. Watch the film here.

Read Judith Naeff’s essay about the film, REVOLUTIONARY REENACTMENT: MILITANT FUTURES PAST , in the academic journal Regards.

74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) premiered at the FID Marseille International Film Festival where it received the GNRC prize. It also won the prize for best film at the Curitiba International Film Festival in Brazil in 2013. Learn more about the film here.

49 mins | Lebanon | 2011

This film is a prologue to 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) and I also co-directed it with Rania Rafei. Based on speculative improvisations, the film asks young political activists to imagine the day students in March 1974 occupied the office of the president of the American University of Beirut.

"The beauty of Prologue - which really is a prologue to a feature film that the directors hope to complete in the coming year - is that virtually all of the dialogue is improvised. The actors are young activists involved in Lebanon's anti-sectarian movement. In addition to reenacting a late twentieth century event, they were asked to address themes of revolution and change, from their own twenty-first century perspective, just as the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were gaining momentum. As such, Prologue blurs the lines between past and present, action and intention, experience, and ambition." Kaelen Wilson-Goldie for Bidoun.

Watch an excerpt from the film here.

Prologue was first screened at Ashkal Alwan's Video Works in 2011 in Beirut and was screened later in venues in New York and Italy. In 2021, Prologue was part of the Making Revolution exhibition in Montreal.