{"id":36405,"date":"2026-09-16T10:55:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T10:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressespartout.com\/?p=36405"},"modified":"2026-09-16T11:06:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T11:06:18","slug":"ecrans-du-reel-a-festival-built-around-the-documentary-gaze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pressespartout.com\/?p=36405","title":{"rendered":"\u00c9crans du R\u00e9el: A Festival Built Around the Documentary Gaze"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Zalfa Assaf<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For nine days, Beirut becomes a meeting point for filmmakers looking at the world from radically different distances.The 21st edition of \u00c9crans du R\u00e9el 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raoul Peck\u2019s 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\u2019\u0152il d\u2019or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and received the Bronze Star in the Feature Documentary Competition at El Gouna Film Festival 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programme then travels through stories in which the personal and the political are often inseparable.In Zahraa Ghandour\u2019s Flana, the disappearance of a childhood friend in Baghdad opens a journey involving memory, family and the stories of women abandoned by their families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 19-year search for him. The investigation becomes, in turn, a search for a Lebanese-born daughter’s own connection to her Libyan identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lebanese filmmaking occupies a substantial place in the selection. Joud Bazoun\u2019s 66 Days returns to her southern village after the 2024 war. In Rayan Bassam\u2019s One Verse for All, Abbas, Abdullah and Ali move among the remains of the destroyed Martyrs\u2019 Kindergarten in Ainata. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mohammad Taleb\u2019s 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\u2019s Even the Stones Flew Away considers how successive cycles of violence become embedded in places and collective memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other films approach conflict through the people who document it.In Mohammad Nassar\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sean Murray\u2019s Journacide: The War on Truth examines the targeting of journalists in Lebanon and Gaza while connecting the question of documenting truth to Murray\u2019s experience in Belfast. Abbas Fahdel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The festival’s programme also makes room for stories in which the consequences of displacement or conflict emerge indirectly.In Carla Awad\u2019s In Between, plants left behind by displaced people become traces of the people who once cared for them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hassan Chami\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elsewhere, the camera moves toward lives shaped by love, migration and cultural inheritance.Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak\u2019s Birds of War draws on 13 years of personal archives to revisit love, revolution and exile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marlene Edoyan\u2019s A Fire There follows three Armenian friends in southern Georgia negotiating the space between inherited traditions and the freedom to determine their own futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Tamara Kotevska\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programme extends further into environmental and cultural questions. Adam Shamseddine\u2019s The Thirsty City examines Lebanon\u2019s water crisis and is followed by a discussion on infrastructure, accountability and the future of the sector. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sami Baloughi\u2019s L\u2019arbre de l\u2019authenticit\u00e9 traces the remains of an agricultural research centre in Congo, linking its history to colonial legacy and climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in Lama Tawk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Family provides another route through the festival. Zeina Saad\u2019s My Mother Who Never Grew Up reconstructs the presence of a mother through her voice and old photographs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Namir Abdel Messeeh\u2019s 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\u2019\u0152il d\u2019or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, closes the festival on September 24.Taken together, the selection reflects one of documentary cinema\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u00c9crans du R\u00e9el places these different ways of seeing alongside one another, allowing each film to create its own encounter with reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00c9crans du R\u00e9el \u2013 Doc Screens, 21st EditionSeptember 16\u201324, 2026Metropolis Cinema, Beirut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zalfa Assaf For nine days, Beirut becomes a meeting point for filmmakers looking at the world from radically different distances.The 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