Movies: Akram Zaatari

A journalist and a photographer drift on their way between Beirut and Baalbeck. Their journey is repeated three times in three different ways to evoke current issues and confusion in Lebanon’s present state....

This portrait of famed Armenian-Egyptian studio photographer Van Leo, whose career spanned some 50 years, is also a reflection on transformations in the practice of photography, from hand-developing to digital manipulation. As Zaatari puts it, "Van L...

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A late night online chat between two men who haven't met since the turn of the millennium leads to their reunion after ten years of separation. The film navigates against time with an unsettling use of communication, recording technologies and tempor...

One of Zaatari’s earliest experiments in documentary video, All Is Well on the Border emerged from the filmmaker’s desire to understand Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon following the 1982 Lebanon War. The video presents a series of testimonies...

TEACH ME is an interpretation of iconic images. This short essay is built on the ascription of a new meaning to TV news footage. The mingling of news soundtracks with dialogues from old Egyptian films enriches the meaning of the images....

Lebanese artist-filmmaker Zaatari conducts both an investigation and a stirring tribute to an act of resistance (or forbearance) that marked his childhood memories: the refusal of an Israeli pilot to bomb a boys' high school in south Lebanon in 1982....

‘Objects of War’ is a series of testimonials on the Lebanese war. Each person chooses an object, ordinary or unusual, which serves as a starting point for his / her story. These testimonials while helping to create a collective memory, also show the ...

The Script is born out of the artist’s research into online content connected with the Arab world. Exploring YouTube using relatively neutral search terms such as ‘father and son’, Zaatari discovered multiple videos depicting fathers praying. Despite...

In the courtyard of an old house in Saida, a woman is rehearsing a scene from a movie. She introduces her family, and the camera records both moments from her family's everyday life and scenes from the upcoming movie....

Set in the industrial suburbs of Beirut, Majnounak explores male sexuality through interviews with men who recount one of their sexual relationships. Attentive to details of body and sexual language, songs, indications of each interlocutor’s erotic i...

RED CHEWING GUM recounts a story of separation between two men. It is a video letter that is set in the context of the changing Hamra, a formerly booming commercial center. It examines the tool of video and image making in relationship to consumption...

GIFT discusses the idea of public space : on a public beach, right across from a residential block, a young boy begs the filmmaker to let him join soccer players in order to appear on television. The faces of the passers-by staring at the camera and ...

This work deals with the discovery of light and of its power to reconstruct images. Through a boy who discovers the possibilities of framing and manipulating light with a mirror, the idea of making images appears in the daily life of the children liv...

Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this film is a reflection on photography and its people. It looks at the position of the individual within the context of war and displacement, as well as how photographs have become the ...

A documentary crew digs up a letter from a Lebanese socialist resistance fighter....

Shot on Gouraud Street in Gemayzeh and edited by Zaatari in Beirut, Lebanon....

It is a critique of television's promotion of political figures. A candidate running for presidency talks about his political agenda and addresses the public with a general and casual speech on issues such as resistance, cultural heritage, and educat...

In a city post-apocalypse, young men communicate only through smart devices. They make home out of urban debris. They can’t speak to each other, but are still able to dream....

Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem explores the work of photographer Hashem el Madani, who has run a commercial photography studio in southern Lebanon for the last five decades. After spending years photographing people in front of their shops, in public...