Karim Ghorayeb

Adonis is a queer seventy-three-year-old man. He currently lives in the Ashrafieh district of Beirut. He continues to water his numerous plants daily and host his numerous friends for cheerful dinners every other week. Adonis is full of stories from the sixties, seventies, eighties and the nineties. Though he did not live continuously in the country, he has been travelling the world, with constant visits to his homeland. Conversations with him can easily switch from academic intricacies to plain old gossip about sexual matters or unresolved crimes. Ameer is a thirty-something younger man who wants to gather stories and anecdotes from Adonis. He feels the Lebanese queer past hasn’t been archived well enough so he views Adonis as the golden hen. However, when he notices Adonis has it easier to be physically nude than to reveal the full nudity of his feelings, he starts feeling frustrated. What else to expect, would Adonis say, from someone who always lived a double life?

A visit to a cosmetic-surgery clinic and the discovery of a lump in his testicle and an abscess in his mouth confront filmmaker Selim Mourad with transience and decay in this unashamedly navel-gazing film essay. ‘Selim from Beirut’ is the last in a long list of names of extinct species he recites during a loveless Grindr meet up.

A nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl contemplates her increasingly bleak future after being forced to drop out of school in the midst of Lebanon’s unprecedented economic collapse and battle with Covid-19.

Follows inmates from Roumieh Prison in Lebanon who produce a play about their fellow prisoners who suffer from mental illness and are thus filed under 'Mad and Possessed' by the Penal Code and forgotten behind bars for life.

Follows inmates from Roumieh Prison in Lebanon who produce a play about their fellow prisoners who suffer from mental illness and are thus filed under 'Mad and Possessed' by the Penal Code and forgotten behind bars for life.

Four people from an Arab generation roaming over the ruins of ideologies, causes and virtues of their predecessors. It portrays their intellectual and emotional nonchalance about what is happening around them in their daily lives and relationships. In a house whose architecture is a sixties' experiment in mixing modern and Islamic architecture, a stone and concrete cube suspended over a rocky shore bashed by the waves of the Mediterranean, by famed Iraqi architect Refaat Chaderji, we spend a night with four characters whose non-stop conversations and peculiar actions reflect the void and chaos they are living in.

Four people from an Arab generation roaming over the ruins of ideologies, causes and virtues of their predecessors. It portrays their intellectual and emotional nonchalance about what is happening around them in their daily lives and relationships. In a house whose architecture is a sixties' experiment in mixing modern and Islamic architecture, a stone and concrete cube suspended over a rocky shore bashed by the waves of the Mediterranean, by famed Iraqi architect Refaat Chaderji, we spend a night with four characters whose non-stop conversations and peculiar actions reflect the void and chaos they are living in.

On a Sunday morning in Beirut, frustrated Mona and her miserable taxi-driver husband Abu Rami set out for a drive across Lebanon to visit their son Rami and his wife. After 40 years of marriage, the couple nag and squabble and Mona is plagued with doubts about his fidelity. When the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, Abu Rami and Mona are stranded without help. While waiting, tensions rise and Mona confronts her husband with her suspicions. He angrily dismisses her thoughts as absurd, but is eventually overcome by guilt and confesses to leading a double life. Mona is devastated and abandons Abu Rami on the side of the road, but not before shattering his world with a secret of her own.

Syrian traditional story-telling, folklore, tales, fictional mythological characters play an important role in their culture. This tradition is passed generation to the next generation — from grandparents to grandchildren. However, in the modern era these stories are being lost. This is happening in Damascus, the capital and the second largest city of Syria, too.