A Filmmaker in Times of War

12 December 2024. From 18:30 | Conference | English | IEMed

Eliane Raheb is a Lebanese filmmaker who has directed several award-winning short films and documentaries. Among her films, we can find Sleepless Nights, which ranked 5^th in the Sight and Sound magazine’s classification for the best documentaries of 2013, and Those who remain, a feature documentary that has participated in more than 70 film festivals and won 7 awards, including l’Etoile de la Scam. Her latest film, titled Miguel’s War, premiered at the Berlinale Panorama in 2021, received the Teddy Award for the best LGBTQ film at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival. Raheb has given lectures about her films and about Arab cinema in prestigious universities around the world, such as Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, Georges Town, Georges Mason and Brown among others, and taught documentary courses at St Joseph University in Beirut between 2003 and 2017. She is also one of the founding members of Aflamuna (previously called Beirut DC) and of ITAR Productions. Since 2019, she is the artistic director of REEF (The Rural Encounters on Environment and Films).

ABSTRACT

Eliane Raheb was born in Lebanon in 1972, three years before the outbreak of the civil war. Her adolescence unfolded under the shadow of the bombs and, by the time the war ended in 1990, she was 18. Those years left her grappling with profound questions: Why do wars happen? How is our identity shaped by violence? Yet, in the aftermath, the amnesty silenced those who had fought in the war and the people who had endured it. Cinema became her way to seek answers.

As she grew older, it became clear that true reconciliation would never occur. This absence paved the way for recurring conflicts and enduring social tensions. As we will see in the projected excerpts, through her films, she has traced this unrest, portraying characters shaped by various wars—individuals confronted with violence, resilience, or both.

Today, she remains in her country, bearing witness to another Israeli war on Gaza and Lebanon, seeing the horrors of genocide, ecocide, and internal fragmentation. As a filmmaker, she continues reflecting on how storytelling can illuminate these dark times.