Best Documentary

Best First Film

Those From the Shore

by Tamara Stepanyan

The Incident

by Meedo Taha

Marseille, 2014. Dozens of Armenian asylum seekers trying to survive while waiting for their application to be considered. They left behind them a country whose people have settled around the world for over a hundred years ... A country all described as desert, abandoned by its inhabitants, emptied of its life. Forced stillness, impotence, they live in an in-between space: between two countries, between two lives. In a time and abstract space, made of nothing, where their life escapes them completely. By the shore, they float in limbo.

A young filmmaker investigates the legend of Manivelle, an automaton gifted to Lebanon in 1945 that still haunts an abandoned mansion in Beirut. After being coaxed back out into the limelight, the people who knew him come forward to speak their mind, and the myth that Manivelle has constructed around himself starts to unravel.

At a bus stop near Beirut, a veiled Lebanese woman and a migrant Syrian worker get in a tumultuous moment and are arrested. They must argue their innocence in the face of the only witnesses: a bus full of women on their way to Koran school, each with her version of the truth.

The night between Ali and I, is a fictional reenactment of a key event in Lebanese and Levantine contemporary History: the hijack of 39 hostages at the Bank of America in Beirut.

The Lebanese Film Festival showcases the best of Lebanese cinema and is the only platform in Lebanon that uniquely promotes Lebanese talent from Lebanon and abroad. In it’s 13th edition, LFF has grown into one of the leading film event in the Middle East.

For this edition, LFF continues to take place in Beirut Souks, CinemaCity at the heart of the city. Over 70 films will be screened at the festival alongside parallel sections that range from a Carte Blanche by Bernard Payen, head of programming at the Cinémathèque Française, to a special screening by Heiny Srour, the first female Lebanese director selected at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as many programs that highlight our focus for this edition: a tribute to women in Lebanese Cinema.

This year, LFF is also starting a collaboration with Films Femmes Francophones I Méditerranée (FFFMed), a scriptwriting residency dedicated to French-speaking women from the Mediterranean.

Awards & Prizes

BEST FILM

BEST DOCUMENTARY

BEST EXPERIMENTAL

BEST FIRST FILM