6–13 September 2026
Metropolis Cinema, Beirut
AFAC Film Week returns from September 6 to 13 at Metropolis Cinema in Beirut. Screening nine films from across the Arab region, the program will bring filmmakers and audiences together through post-screening Q&As and in-depth conversations on the realities of making independent cinema in the Arab region today. Ahead of AFAC’s 20th anniversary, this event celebrates cinema as a space for memory, dialogue, resistance, and imagination.
Program Overview
Sunday, 6 September
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6:00 PM: Opening
7:00 PM: Stranger than Fiction | Nour Ouayda
8:00 PM:
Agora | Alaeddine Slim
Monday, 7 September
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8:00 PM:
Birdland | Leila Kilani
Followed by a Q&A
Tuesday, 8 September
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6:00 PM:
Les Tempêtes (Silent Storms) | Dania Raymond
Followed by a Q&A
8:00 PM:
Khartoum | Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Phil Cox
Followed by a Q&A
Wednesday, 9 September
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8:00 PM:
Perfumed with Mint | Muhammad Hamdy
Thursday, 10 September
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5:00 PM - 7:00 PM: Cinema as Infrastructure: Perfumed with Mint as a Case Study
8:00 PM:
Deserts | Faouzi Bensaidi
Followed by a Q&A
Friday, 11 September
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2:30 PM: Syrian Cinema Sessions | Case Study: Memory, Archive, and Narratives - Screenings and Audiences
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM: Excessive Genocide by Samir Skayni and The Ongoing War and Rare Images by Ahmed Isamaldin
8:00 PM:
Republic of Silence | Diana El Jeiroudi
Followed by a Q&A
Saturday, 12 September
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2:30 PM: Syrian Cinema Sessions | Case Study: Institutional Structures and Independent Initiatives
6:00 PM: “No Glass Wall Will Hold the Frame” | Saba Innab
8:00 PM:
Habibi Hussein | Alex Bakr
Followed by a Q&A
Sunday, 13 September
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5:00 PM - 7:00 PM: Images’ Right to Return by Mohanad Yaqubi and On the Political Economy of the Film Industry and the Infrastructure of the Image by Mariz Kelada
8:00 PM:
The Settlement | Mohammed Rashad
Followed by a Q&A
Film Program | Spirits and Ghosts
Through nine films from Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, we explore a range of cinematic worlds rooted in diverse geopolitical, historical, and production contexts across the Arab region, navigating between the harshness of an extreme reality—when it seems to offer no way out—and imagination as a tenacious practice of creating paths beyond it.
Public Program | Thinking Through the Rubble, Beneath the Surface
Encounters, readings, non-academic performances, and discussions explore—through both image and text—what remains alive beneath the rubble: the layers invisible at first glance; the history that continues to breathe beneath the surface of disaster; beneath the surface of images and their economies; and the possibilities that, despite everything, continue to resist the logic of annihilation and oblivion.