Zalfa Assaf

For nine days, Beirut becomes a meeting point for filmmakers looking at the world from radically different distances.The 21st edition of Écrans du Réel Doc Screens opens today, September 16, at Metropolis Cinema, and runs until September 24, bringing together a wide-ranging selection of international and Lebanese documentaries that move between personal histories, political realities, memory, displacement, family, culture, the environment and the landscapes people call home.Rather than fitting its programme into a single thematic box, the festival builds its identity through contrast.

A film can begin with a family photograph and lead into questions of exile. Another can enter the aftermath of war through a damaged landscape. Elsewhere, a personal archive becomes a historical record, an unfinished building becomes a vessel for memory, or a musician’s work becomes a way of measuring years of upheaval.The opening film establishes that range from the outset.

Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, screening tonight at 7:30 PM, revisits George Orwell through his writings, archival material and the political world that shaped his thinking. The BAFTA-winning filmmaker approaches the author of 1984 and Animal Farm through questions of power, language, surveillance and the manipulation of truth. The film was nominated for the L’Œil d’or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and received the Bronze Star in the Feature Documentary Competition at El Gouna Film Festival 2025.

The programme then travels through stories in which the personal and the political are often inseparable.In Zahraa Ghandour’s Flana, the disappearance of a childhood friend in Baghdad opens a journey involving memory, family and the stories of women abandoned by their families.

Papa and Gaddafi follows Jihan as she investigates the disappearance of her father, Mansour Rashid Al-Kikhia, the peaceful Libyan opposition figure who vanished in 1993, while retracing her mother Bahaa Al-Omari’s 19-year search for him. The investigation becomes, in turn, a search for a Lebanese-born daughter’s own connection to her Libyan identity.

Lebanese filmmaking occupies a substantial place in the selection. Joud Bazoun’s 66 Days returns to her southern village after the 2024 war. In Rayan Bassam’s One Verse for All, Abbas, Abdullah and Ali move among the remains of the destroyed Martyrs’ Kindergarten in Ainata.

Mohammad Taleb’s Am I the Target? follows a young man living alone in Beirut after his family relocates to Baalbek for safety, turning displacement into a deeply personal confrontation with home and belonging. And Anis Nassereddine’s Even the Stones Flew Away considers how successive cycles of violence become embedded in places and collective memory.

Other films approach conflict through the people who document it.In Mohammad Nassar’s More Than a Witness, a paramedic carries a camera alongside his medical equipment until the moment arrives when filming must give way to saving a life.

Sean Murray’s Journacide: The War on Truth examines the targeting of journalists in Lebanon and Gaza while connecting the question of documenting truth to Murray’s experience in Belfast. Abbas Fahdel’s Tales of the Wounded Land returns to southern Lebanon, observing a landscape marked by destruction and a community attempting to rebuild everyday life. The film won Best Director in the International Competition at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.

The festival’s programme also makes room for stories in which the consequences of displacement or conflict emerge indirectly.In Carla Awad’s In Between, plants left behind by displaced people become traces of the people who once cared for them.

Hassan Chami’s A Village Out of Frame turns to an archive of photographs from his southern Lebanese village after he becomes unable to return. And in Firas Al-Hallak’s Dome Sessions, the unfinished Oscar Niemeyer dome in Tripoli becomes the setting for a film built around sound, its extraordinary 23-second echo transforming architecture into an experience of memory.

Elsewhere, the camera moves toward lives shaped by love, migration and cultural inheritance.Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak’s Birds of War draws on 13 years of personal archives to revisit love, revolution and exile.

Marlene Edoyan’s A Fire There follows three Armenian friends in southern Georgia negotiating the space between inherited traditions and the freedom to determine their own futures.

In Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan, the life of farmer Nikola becomes connected to that of an injured white stork, bringing together economic migration and climate change.

The programme extends further into environmental and cultural questions. Adam Shamseddine’s The Thirsty City examines Lebanon’s water crisis and is followed by a discussion on infrastructure, accountability and the future of the sector.

Sami Baloughi’s L’arbre de l’authenticité traces the remains of an agricultural research centre in Congo, linking its history to colonial legacy and climate change.

And in Lama Tawk’s For a Future That May or May Not Be, Lebanese musicians become the protagonists of a story about making and sustaining music through decades of political and social upheaval, from the Lebanese Civil War to the conflicts of recent years.

Family provides another route through the festival. Zeina Saad’s My Mother Who Never Grew Up reconstructs the presence of a mother through her voice and old photographs.

Namir Abdel Messeeh’s Life After Siham begins with the death of his mother and expands into an exploration of family history between Egypt and France, bringing together cinema, exile and love. The film, which received two awards at El Gouna Film Festival 2025 and was nominated for the L’Œil d’or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, closes the festival on September 24.Taken together, the selection reflects one of documentary cinema’s most distinctive possibilities: the ability to move between the intimate and the historical without separating the two.A missing person can become a story about identity.

A photograph can become an archive. A village can become a memory. A building can speak through its silence. A song can carry the weight of decades.And across nine days at Metropolis Cinema, Écrans du Réel places these different ways of seeing alongside one another, allowing each film to create its own encounter with reality.

Écrans du Réel – Doc Screens, 21st EditionSeptember 16–24, 2026Metropolis Cinema, Beirut.

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An orphan girl, Momo, must do battle with the soulless and grey men who stealthily take over her city and steal everyone’s time. The big-screen adaptation of Michael Ende’s best-selling fantasy novel where friendship and courage ignite a race to save everyone’s time from the grips of a greedy corporation.

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Starring Emmy and BAFTA-winning actor Martin Freeman, known for his roles in “The Hobbit” trilogy, “Black Panther”. Claes Bang, known for Ruben Östlund’s “The Square”, the Netflix series “Dracula” and Robert Eggers’ epic “The Northman”. Directed by Christian Ditter (How to Be Single). This €33 million-budget movie is produced by Rat Pack (The Wave, Colonia), and Constantin Film (The Physician). Set for release in theaters on September 3rd.

Duration: 94 min
Genre: Family/Fantasy

NOW SHOWING AT GRAND CINEMAS.

Ryan Hachem

Among the films recently shown at Grand Cinemas, The Dog Stars is a 118-minute post-apocalyptic thriller directed by Ridley Scott and written by Mark L. Smith, adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel. The film stars Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley, with Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong and Allison Janney in supporting roles.

Set in 2035, after a deadly flu pandemic has devastated humanity, the film follows Hig, a young pilot and mechanic who lives at an abandoned airfield in Colorado with his dog Jasper and Bangley, a former Marine and hardened survivalist. Their isolated existence depends on discipline, vigilance and a constant awareness of the dangers beyond their perimeter. When Hig picks up a mysterious radio transmission, his curiosity becomes a desire to discover whether something more than survival is still possible.

The journey takes Hig beyond the security of his familiar world and eventually brings him into contact with Cima and her father, Pops. Cima, a doctor and survivor living with her father in an isolated mountain community, introduces Hig to the possibility of trust and companionship in a world where most encounters are defined by fear and suspicion.

Scott’s approach is strongest when he allows the landscape to carry part of the story. The vast Colorado wilderness, abandoned spaces and open skies give the film a striking sense of scale, while Hig’s small, carefully protected existence makes that landscape feel both beautiful and threatening. The contrast between the enormous world outside and the fragile lives surviving within it becomes one of the film’s most effective visual ideas.

The film also finds its emotional centre in the relationship between Hig, Jasper and Bangley. They represent three different forms of attachment in a world stripped of ordinary human contact. Hig still searches for connection, Bangley has hardened himself against it, while Jasper offers the uncomplicated loyalty that has become increasingly rare around them. As the story moves forward, the loss and loneliness carried by these characters give the survival narrative a more intimate dimension.

Ridley Scott keeps the action grounded in physical space. Rather than filling the film with uninterrupted spectacle, he builds tension around distance, isolation and the possibility of sudden violence. The aerial sequences provide a sense of freedom that contrasts sharply with the vulnerability of life on the ground, while the encounters with hostile survivors bring the danger back to a much more immediate and physical level.

Jacob Elordi gives Hig a restrained performance, allowing the character’s grief and uncertainty to emerge without overstatement. Josh Brolin brings a tougher, more defensive presence to Bangley, creating a convincing contrast between two men who have learned very different ways of surviving. Margaret Qualley gives Cima warmth and emotional depth, gradually opening the story toward something beyond fear and self-preservation.

The film’s main weakness is its uneven balance between contemplation, action and darker material. Its deliberate pace gives the characters and landscape room to breathe, but some stretches feel longer than necessary. The post-apocalyptic premise is also familiar territory, and not every idea introduced by the screenplay receives enough development.

Still, The Dog Stars becomes more compelling when it moves away from the familiar question of how to survive and toward the more difficult question of why. Beneath its devastated landscapes and violent encounters, Scott’s film is ultimately concerned with loneliness, memory, loss and the possibility of rebuilding human connection after almost everything has disappeared.

The world may have ended, but The Dog Stars is less interested in the end itself than in what comes after it: the difficult search for something, or someone, that makes survival worth continuing.

For the latest movie schedule and upcoming screenings, visit our website and check the new Grand Cinemas schedule.