A young man's tragic death at Beirut's seaside causes his friends to grapple with loss and to partake in his community's rites and ceremonies, exposing the city's schisms and its society's fault lines
Doaa
This is a story about pain, search for meaning in life and friendship of orphaned. Syrian boys - Isa, Ahmed and Muataz - who live a difficult life as refugees in the magical, mythical Turkish city of Sanliurfa. In their search for recovery from traumatic past, the children will cross the path from destructiveness and hostility to meaningfulness and love. By finding friends in each other, the boys will find their inner peace.
Carole
After surviving a car crash in the middle of Lebanon's isolated Beqaa Valley, an amnesiac man finds himself held hostage on a local farm that doubles as an illegal drug-production facility.
Six Lebanese women representing three generations, each one still waiting for the man in her life who was kidnapped during the Lebanese Civil War and is still missing.
Zaynab
Desperate to put the traumatic loss of their infant child behind them, newlywed couple Khalid and Salama return to their home in the United Arab Emirates. Unknown to the couple, their new luxury apartment block, Al Hamra, was built on the site of an old abandoned fishing village of the same name. Legend has it the village was abandoned after manevolant beings haunted its inhabitants. Unsettled by her new surroundings and the eerie hallways of Al Hamra, Khalid worries his wife is failing to battle her personal demons – but could it be something far more sinister?
Najwa
It was the summer of 82, when a priest, about to be ordered, was exhausted by temptations and an arrogant girl felt passionately in love... A sifted memory and a personal history of a narrator who tells with nostalgia and poetry the meeting of his parents until their marriage...
Following on from the 2006 Israeli aggression on Lebanon, the filmmaker tries to film the destruction of Beirut. We witness a city deserted by life, and ghostly characters who, featured in his earlier films, talk about living through such a war.
Soraya
In Beirut, the destinies of several thirtysomethings (an architect, a tour guide, a mystic, a radio operator, and an exile returned home) collide.
Late in the 1980s it seems like the Lebanese conflict will never end. Khalil returns to Beirut after many years. Ten years earlier, during a battle, he took advantage of the confusion and pretended he was dead.
Filmed in post-war Beirut, Leyla Assaf-Tengroth’s "Al-Sheikha" proposes a trajectory around the city guided by an unusual little girl, hustling to find her bearings in a place that appears both hostile and inspiring.
Directed by Leyla Assaf-Tengroth.
