Movies: Manal Issa

A thirtysomething hopes to leave an impact... by hiring a down-on-his-luck cameraman to document his suicide. He plans a number of things off his chest, from declaring his love to his childhood crush to sharing accounts of botched hookups, run-ins wi...

From war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics, two young sisters embark on a risky voyage, putting their hearts and their swimming skills to heroic use....

Maia, a single mother, lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex. On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected delivery: notebooks, tapes, and photos Maia, from 13 to 18 years old, sent from Beirut to her best friend who left for Paris to esc...

Malek, a Lebanese immigrant from Montreal, is haunted by the violent death of his sister. Convinced that he could have avoided this tragedy, he is consumed with guilt. He lives alone, poor, jobless until he meets Shohreh, an Iranian girl, with whom h...

Some young folks, tired of the society they're living in, plan a bomb attack over Paris before taking shelter for a night in a shopping center....

Joseph and his two sons, Joachim and Ivan, form a close-knit family but fail to see that each one is losing control of his life. Joachim is supposed to be studying psychiatry but spends most of his time daydreaming about his ex-girlfriend, Ivan canno...

Set in the desolate wreckage of Beirut’s Piccadilly Theater after decades of war, the film recounts three days in the life of a writer and actors. As they seek to revive the ghostly theater with a production of Sophocles’ Elektra, the actors witness ...

In the near future, a micro-worker performs tasks that are suggested to her. Between data center maintenance and data processing, she hesitantly searches for ways to feel emotions. Devoid of social links, this world is saturated with data....

Paris, France, 1979. Rose, a rebellious orphaned teenager, and Michel, a young aspiring painter, enjoy their crazy love under the neon lights of the decadent nightclub Le Palace, where they establish an ambiguous relationship with Lucille and Hubert,...

Four darkly funny tales about Lebanon: Activists planning a protest descend into internal strife. Three sisters and their mother argue while an incompetent plumber destroys their flat. Depressed life coach Malek wants to die and seeks help from a «de...

Lebanon, 1982. To keep a promise made to an old friend, Georges, an idealistic theater director, travels to Beirut for a project as utopian as it is risky: to stage the play Antigone on the front line, in order to steal a moment of peace from the rag...

Ulysses, a secluded artist who mysteriously retired a few years ago, meets Mona, a young art student full of life. The encounter will change them both....

Video #2 of Finite Rants, a series of eight visual essays commissioned by Fondazione Prada and curated by Luigi Alberto Cippini and Niccolò Gravina. Bertrand Bonello reworks the last minutes of his 2016 film Nocturama, which documents the logistical ...

Damascus, Spring 2011. It's the early stages of the civil war. 25-year-old Nahla is torn between her desire for freedom and the hope of leaving the country thanks to her arranged marriage with Samir, a Syrian expatriate in the USA. When he chooses he...

18-year-old Lina arrives in Paris for her studies. She comes to look for what she has never found in Lebanon, her country of origin: a certain form of freedom. The survival instinct as the only baggage, she sails from one Paris to another to the rhyt...

In Beirut on September 22, 2024, just hours before bombing escalated throughout the country, the Lebanese French actress Manal Issa considers the role of the actor during the unfolding global conflict....

In three reenactments of a controversial 1983 television interview, actors Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval play late French actress Maria Schneider. “The Listening Takes” is a prescient confrontation with the patriarchal structure of th...

The exits of a Berlin courtyard are blocked by the police due to an ambiguous event outside and a state of emergency occurs. Among the residents of the building, insecurities start to pump fear. Suspicion takes over panic, prejudices bring polarizati...

In post-war Lebanon, Ida, a young Lebanese girl, flees her small village and her alcoholic mother and goes to the big city. There, she starts dating a European man not knowing what is in store for her....

A young woman makes her way back home to her parents’ house in the middle of the night leaving a bad experience behind. Haunting pressures to fit back into the family dynamics as well as revealing details of her life abroad weigh heavy on her. Feelin...