Part of Arab Women in the Arts 2026

In this shorts program, Danielle Arbid offers four portraits of her family. Beginning with her father, whose illness prompts closer reflection of their connection to each other. Her mother’s voice grows more tense and agitated with each phone call as she drives through Beirut. Her relationship with her brother is revealed through a photo story, which hints at their shared memories of violence from the war. Finally, the artist ends on a self-portrait in the form of a photo intended for a lover and never sent, reflecting on a past made up of fiction and memory. Lebanon remains foregrounded through all the tenderness, fear, pain, loss and madness of these intimate moments, captured before they can disappear.

Co-presented by Batikh Batikh.

Doors open at 6:30 PM, screening will start at 7:00 PM. Seating is first come, first served.

Nous/Niha (2005) - 15 min
Two characters only, or rather three: one of them is the film director, Danielle Arbid; the second is Danielle’s father, the healthy, lively version of the past, with a mouth to speak with and eyes to see with; the third is the same man in the present, a very ill one nearing his end. We see him only from the back, no face, no voice. A creature about to go whose presence the film director seems to be afraid of – or maybe, she fears his absence even more. The fear of loss is mixed with the fear of getting lost.

Allo Cherie (2015) - 23 min
As she is driving through Beirut, a woman - the filmmaker’s mother - calls her banks, her lawyer, her friends, her creditors and their intermediaries by phone. “Norma, darling, let him sign the check today!” Jeannette says she is exhausted and suffers from repeated insomnia, but her carry on calling without taking any rest suggests that she still has verbal fuel to spare.

Souvenirs de Violence (2020) - 15 min
I don’t know my brother, Joe, very well. He is five years younger than me. We were raised together for only a few years in Lebanon. I left when I was seventeen; he stayed behind. During those years we lived together, we suffered through war—both the war between our parents and the broader conflict in Lebanon. Perhaps that was our secret: those memories of violence we shared as children—memories we were always ashamed to recall. Like a secret wound that binds us together forever…

I Give My Heart a Medal for Letting Go of You (2022) - 14min
“In my head, there are just a few fragments… Dates, furtive moments, rare images sometimes appear. I make films to reconstruct them, and then I spent entire years like that, looking at the black holes in my history, to be able to tell them. And, in the end, I don’t know anymore if what I imagined was the product of my memory, or just my true invention. To be honest, I enjoy this uncanny feeling of ‘unreality’.” Danielle Arbid rumbles with memory, resonances from a distant and not so distant past, a projection through the colours of relations. She manages to find reality in its own fiction.