Vartan Avakian

"Thirty-five years ago, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I knew. He has disappeared since. Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking in the street, but I wasn’t sure it was him. Parts of his face were torn off, but his features had remained unchanged since the incident. Yet something was different, as if he wasn’t the same man” (Ghassan Halwani).

In the fading grandeur of downtown Cairo, Khalid, a 35-year-old filmmaker is struggling to make a film that captures the pulse of his city at a moment when all around him dreams as much as buildings are disintegrating. With the help of his friends who send him footage from their lives in Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin, he finds the strength to keep going through the difficulty and beauty of living IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY.

Marwa Arsanios’ video Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling Is Extending is an investigation into the changing landscape of Beirut, the city where she lives and works. After the closure of a major municipal landfill site in 2015, thousands of tons of rubbish clogged the streets of Beirut. This led to public outcry, protests and accusations of government corruption. Since the 1990s, in the years following the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Beirut has been rapidly reshaped by property developers. Using strategically placed rubbish dumps, the surrounding land is devalued and left open for redevelopment. The aftermath of this process is the subject of the film, a portrait of a contested urban environment that connects the crisis with the city’s property boom.

He bought a video camera in 1983, and nothing has been the same since. ‘Films are real-ity’, he told me. Some years later he asked for Nicole Ballan’s leaked sextape.

Hasan Hourani, a Palestinian poet and illustrator, died aged 29 in Jaffa while trying to rescue his nephew from the sea. Shortly after, the filmmaker Mais Darwazah discovers his drawings and poems and feels drawn to Hourani's world— a universe outside space and time; a place of wonder, discovery, and freedom. Motivated by this kinship, Darwazah embarks on a journey to her homeland, Palestine: a place she has never known.