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Khaled D. Ramadan is a videographer and documentarist with diverse interests in the fields of visual culture, social history, scientific research and critical theory, which have greatly influenced his work. He often makes use of video, the internet, lighting and sound performance, and digital photography to construct work that illuminates our notions of personal identity and community. Ramadan utilizes his work as an agent for empowerment to involve viewers from all different backgrounds and communities.

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Akram Zaatari is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut. In addition to his television and teaching experiences, he is author of more than 30 videos, and video installations. Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), he based his work on collecting, studying, and archiving the photographic history of the Middle East notably the work of Hashem el Madani. This research was the basis for a series of exhibitions and publications. He has text contributions in scholarly journals such as Third Text, Bomb, Framework, Transition, and Parachute. He is a regular contributor in Zawaya.

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The Tornado 2002

Controversial and banned in most Arab countries because of its religious symbolism and harrowing images of victims during Lebanon’s civil war, dying Christ-like, gazing at the sky, heavy with doubts and questions, The Tornado tells the life of Akram, an art student in the Soviet Union, who returns home for a family visit. Repulsed by the war destroying his homeland, Akram remains at first a witness to the chaos around him. However, he is slowly drawn into the cycle of violence until he commits his first murder. Akram realizes that the intensity of the civil war makes it impossible for him to stay neutral. He discovers that every observer becomes eventually a participant. In Habchi’s film, Christ is killed on the roadside, in a church, as he travels with his disciples, or during a procession; he does not die alone so others might live but alongside and with his followers whom he fails to save. Cruelly, his mantle is taken and worn by a gunman who commits a horrible massacre. Habchi suggests that the death of God is an end in itself so others might no longer die in his name.

Leila and the Wolves:

A docu-drama about the fight against victimisation of Arab women. An unlikely interlocutor garbed in a sheer white dress, Leila time-travels through the eight decades of this century, stopping here (at a time of revolution when women larded wedding invitations with news of hidden arms) and there (when young girls at the barricades are goaded into fatal action by chauvinist remarks). Visually, Heiny Srour’s film is a treat, combining tinted newsreel footage with memorable images and clearly loving shots of a strife-torn nation; the acts of courage she reveals, and the example she sets to other film-makers to engage their own history, are exalting. FD

Source : Time Out Film Guide 13

Ca Sera Beau – from Beirut with Love – 2005
A military helicopter in the sky like an evil wasp. Chaos on the ground after the attack. A fast-paced sequence – bleeding people, burning cars and confused soldiers. Subheading: From Beirut – with Love. A cinematic postcard-greeting, so bitter and cynical, it can only come from a city being at war with itself. Fronts of houses scarred by bullet holes, forgotten mines, armed soldiers, armed civilians – not a conflict anywhere near a solution. Somewhere in between young men, who can only choose between army, religion and drugs. A delirious, unsettling film about anger and violence and fantasies of death. Ca sera beau – it would be beautiful, if blood slapped against the window after a shot through the mouth. This only dialogue in the film brings about a surprising connotation: Beirut is Paris, or Madrid, or any other metropolis. The scenario is set: youth without perspective, bomb attacks, drugs, arms, soldiers. The postcard has arrived.

source : dokfestival-leipzig

Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and video artist. He is the author of Distracted (Station Hill, 1991; 2nd ed., Tuumba, 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (Station Hill, 1993; 2nd ed., Post-Apollo, 2003), Over-Sensitivity (Sun & Moon, 1996), Forthcoming (Atelos, 2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post-Apollo, 2002), and Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (Post-Apollo Press, 2005). His videos and mixed media works have been presented in North America, Brazil, the Middle East and Europe, most recently at the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He co-edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World, and edited the special Discourse issues Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee and Mortals to Death. Toufic has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie.
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will be online on Friday 23th September, interview with the mythical Lebanese filmmakers couple.

Christian Ghazi was born on November 19, 1934 in Antioch / Turkey , from a french mother and a lebanese father.His family moved to Syria then to Lebanon in 1939 where it settled, and where Christian studied, worked, lived, and witnessed the destruction of all his work – the burning of all his films. While working in the newspaper “ Le Soir ” and teaching philosophy , Christian Ghazi was studying music at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts ( 1959 ). Later he worked at the TV station Lubnan wal Mahreq, and started to make documentaries. His first documentaries commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in 1964 were all banned and burned for being subversive. Christian had filmed people at the Casino du Liban and in restaurants, and the miserable peasants in the North and South of the country, then matched the images of the casino with the audio of the peasants ; in 1988 while Christian was away in Africa, his house in Beirut was devasted by a local militia, and again all his films ( the only negatives ) were burned. Between these two dates (1964 and 1988),this veteran filmmaker had an abundant production-29 films- mostly about the Palestinian resistance, but also about the Lebanese war, the misery, the refugees…
The only remaining of his films is “ one hundred faces for a single day ” which he considers as his “ manifesto of cinema ” (the only copy of this film was found in Damascus where it competed in an alternative film festival and won the critics’ award).
Twelve years after his great loss, Christian realizes “ Coffin of the memory ” (2001), a documentary “ about the political insularity and apathy prevalent among so many Lebanese, despite the violence suffered by the people in the region, in Palestine and Iraq ”, according to his own words.
Since 1959, Christian Ghazi has also written 4 poetry collections.