February 2025
REBEL FLESH Featuring: Rahmaneh Rabani, Yasman Baghban, Nazanin Noroozi, Maaman Rezai, Elahe Esmaeili and Jocelyne SaabCurated by Homa Sarabi Screening Online: February 14 – 23, 2025 RSVP: artearchive.orgAvailable worldwideFREE / $5 suggested donation Screening In-person:Impasse, by Rahmaneh RabaniA Feast in a Mirror, by Yasman BaghbanThis Bitter Earth, by Nazanin Noroozi Followed by a Q&A with Yasman Baghban and Nazanin Noroozi Date: 19…
Rafik Boustani, Jocelyne Saab
, 1980
, 52 min
A documentary on the Iranian revolution from the point of view of Lebanese filmmakers (Jocelyne Saab with Rafic Boustani). In an attempt to understand what this wave of change will mean for the rest of the region, they travel from Tehran to Isfahan, Shiraz, Qom and to the Afghan border. Camera in hand, they take…
Joe Namy
, 2024
, 5 min
Libretto-o-o is an exploration of the history and resonance of Middle Eastern opera. Shot across six historically significant opera houses in Algiers, Beirut, Cairo, Marrakech, Muscat, and Tunis – some of which were never completed, others ranking amongst the most lavish theaters ever constructed – this architecture film offers a meditative portrait of the grand theater;…
Akram Zaatari
, 2011
, 12 min
Synopsis; An intense conversation between two people one evening leads to a pictorial love story about loss and longing. An homage to Eric Rohmer and the attention he paid to the tiny details of everyday life. An eternal story of love and separation.
Mary Jirmanus Saba
, 2017
, 99 min
In her directorial debut, Mary Jirmanus Saba deals with a forgotten revolution, saving from oblivion bloodily suppressed strikes at Lebanese tobacco and chocolate factories. These events from the 1970s, which held the promise of a popular revolution and, with it, of women’s emancipation, were erased from collective memory by the country’s civil wars. Rich in…
Mohamed Soueid
, 2020
, 170 min
Soueid’s magnus opus, a gargantuan flux that is both timeless and multi-temporal, THE INSOMNIA OF A SERIAL DREAMER amalgamates the past into the present (“a present in the past tense”), and from the schizophrenic streets of Beirut opens onto the world: the world that a Middle East Airlines captain has traveled and now remembers from his patio…
, 2008
, 87 min
Through the story of a son reconstructing his father’s revolutionary past from a diary, Soueid draws a portrait of two generations of men, fathers and sons, who were revolutionaries of the 1970s. This is a poetic flight in time, back to when young men dreamed of changing the world with their own hands, and forward…
, 1998
, 70 min
One of Soueid’s finest and most representative cinematographic achievements, TANGO OF YEARNING melancholically exemplifies the relational essence of his cinema. It is at once a film about love (for cinema, for life and its characters), about Soueid’s work for the Lebanese state broadcaster Tele Liban, and about the mysterious death of the Egyptian Jewish actress Camelia. The…
, 1994
, 41 min
A documentary on the life and ambitions of a young Lebanese cross-dresser, the video follows her journey from soldier to cabaret dancer in an effort to raise funds for her sex change operation. Shot in Beirut, CINEMA FOUAD weaves a complex and multi-layered story of sexuality, identity, and desire, and paints a compelling portrait of its subject….
, 2013
, 8 min
Between 2012 and 2013, artist Lara Baladi created the immersive, surround-sound video installation, Don’t Touch Me Tomatoes & Chachacha as a direct response to the ill-concealed misogyny which had been surfacing around the world (and continues to), and which at the time, in Egypt in particular, was amplified by the use of sexual abuse as a counter-revolutionary…
