Erweiterte Suche

Das Portrait eines Mannes, der zu Zeiten des Kalten Krieges den internationalen Terrorismus miterfand und die politischen Machtspiele fьr seine ganz persцnlichen Zwecke zu nutzen wusste.

Layla, a young mother and model wife, spends the summer in the remote Christian mountains. One day she has an accidental encounter with a Frenchman that opens Layla's eyes to her condition as a woman living in a patriarchal society.

One evening, a married young singer Zoha meets the French lawyer Mathieu in a night club in Beirut. Mathieu will become suspected of spying, while Zoha is trying to flee from her husband. Despite these problems, the two will witness a love story for few days mixed with violence and fear.

The 90s. Lina, 18, arrives to Paris for her studies. She is looking for what she can't find in her home country Lebanon: a taste of freedom. She experiences different sides of the Parisian jungle and becomes conscious of her own place.

A young Palestinian schoolteacher gives birth to her son in an Israeli prison where she fights to protect him, survive and maintain hope.

In the 80s, Aram, a young man from Marseille of Armenian origin, blows up the Turkish ambassador's car in Paris. Gilles Tessier, a young cyclist who was passing at that moment, is seriously injured. Aram, on the run, joins the Armenian Liberation Army in Beirut, the hotbed of international revolution in those years. Gilles is trying to understand when Anouch, Aram's mother, arrives in his hospital room to beg his forgiveness. She admits that her son planted the bomb. Aram clashes with his comrades in Beirut and decides to meet his victim to make him his spokesman.

A small-time gambler in his 40s, struggling to rebuild his life after a few years in prison.

It's Independence Day in Lebanon: three women who've never met before are on the same bus heading to visit a prison situated in a remote area of the country. Traveling through an arid landscape littered with mines and decapitated dreams, the journey transforms into the women's quest for their own independence.

For an estimated population of 4 million, Lebanon boasts some 200,000 foreign domestic workers, contracted under a system of full custodianship that deprives them of basic rights. Implemented since the start of the civil war (1975), this system is borrowed from similar ones in the Gulf countries. It is predicated on a transaction whereby the worker is not providing a service, but is rather commodified as a product, with specialized agencies organizing their import under conditions not unlike modern-day outposts of slavery. Director Maher Abi Samra places his camera inside the offices of the El Raed agency with the full complicity of its owner Zein. Diligently, unobtrusively, he observes and probes.

A reflection on the destinies of comrades who were once bound by ideologies and remain tightly knit friends, We Were Communists an uninhibited examination of the legacy of Lebanon's civil war and its post-war present. Four men recount their stories from the battlefield, their broken dreams, and their eventual disillusionment in light of the country's unsettled crises. Artistically and politically audacious, incisive and tender, the film travels the chimeric and daunting reality of Lebanon's fractured post-war landscape. As sectarian leaders continue to strengthen their hold over political discourse, the film poses serious questions regarding the country's future.

Roda, comedian and stand-up, is facing an identity quest taking him to the country of his origins, unknown and dreadful to him : Lebanon.

1974. Lebanon is in intellectual, cultural and political ferment. Between March and April, for 37 days, a few students from the American University of Beirut occupy the university's premises to protest against rising tuition fees. 2011: in the midst of the Arab Spring, Rania and Raed Rafei decide to step back and reconsider today's situation in the light of that period which was pregnant with hope, but also a prelude to civil war. Should they revive the past? Recall it? Reconstruct it? That's a crucial question. Here the method is decisive. First, make meticulous research. Then launch the experiment, as the film doesn't only reread past events, but also searches for their echo in today's time. Thus yesterday's protagonists are portrayed by their likely modern counterparts, political actors involved in present struggles. What is democracy today, and how can we fight? A few guidelines, a few emblematic accessories as so many signs (a picture of Che Guevara, a megaphone) and here they go, launching into an experiment based on improvisation, in which a form of theatricality accentuated by the enclosed setting interact with cinema. And in this dialectic of past and present, memories go around as freely as words in present time, just like in the interviews which punctuate the film - yesterday's and today's words getting inextricably mixed.

At a shop on a Paris street corner, Arabic-speaking men are often overheard engaging in friendly conversation. The sentiments shared in this gathering place for immigrant men resonate with letters the director's father wrote to his family in Lebanon years ago, and the nostalgia they bring makes it feel as though time has stopped.