A radiant and candid portrait of actress and dancer Souraya Baghdadi.

“I don’t want to be placed in the position of the widow bowing before her partner’s genius. No.” Nicolas Khoury’s film begins with this refusal: Souraya Baghdadi wants to be seen in her own right, rather than solely through her relationship with Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Baghdadi, who died in 1993. From her Paris apartment, Souraya speaks with Khoury, who remains in Lebanon. Between Maroun Baghdadi’s films, their conversations at a distance and Souraya’s almost unreal appearances, the film creates a portrait as free and unpredictable as its subject.

In the presence of Souraya Baghdadi

With CINEMAMED & BAFF – Beirut Art Film Festival

In Tripoli, Lebanon, an unfinished dome designed by architect Niemeyer becomes a strange chamber for musical echoes.

In 1975, war interrupted the construction of a dome designed by Oscar Niemeyer in Tripoli. The unfinished concrete structure was left behind with an exceptional acoustic. For five days, Firas El Hallak invited musicians to experiment with this unique space. Their performances form a musical film in which the history of Tripoli and the traces of a modernist project shattered by violence resonate.

With CINEMAMED & BAFF – Beirut Art Film Festival

READ MORE CINERGIE

In Tripoli, the cinemas have disappeared. The memories remain very much alive.

Between the 1930s and the end of the 20th century, Tripoli was home to more than thirty cinemas. The « cilama » were more than places to watch films: they were places to meet, learn, debate, hide and resist. Decades later, filmmaker Hady Zaccak searches for what remains. Drawing on hundreds of images and around forty testimonies, he brings together cinematic memories, archives, personal stories and wartime experiences in a love letter to Tripoli and cinema.

With CINEMAMED & BAFF – Beirut Art Film Festival

BAFF & WIELS

Three short films by Lebanese artist Ali Cherri

Somniculus – 14′
The Disquiet – 20′
Petrified – 12′

Across these three short films, Lebanese artist Ali Cherri explores how the past continues to inhabit the present. From museums to landscapes and archaeological sites, fossils, statues and other traces become silent witnesses to wars, conquests, displacement and violence.

In partnership with WIELS. From the 5th of September 2026 till the 3rd of January 2027, Soul Witness brings together several major bodies of work by Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) for the first time. Spanning audiovisual works, sculptures, watercolours and installations, the exhibition explores how institutions of power — from the nation-state and the military to the museum — shape the ways history is constructed and remembered.

SESSION PRESENTED BY HELENA KRITIS, CURATOR OF THE ALI CHERRI EXHIBITION AT WIELS WIELS

In a Lebanon at war, poet Nadia Tuéni meets those who refuse to give up on their country.

Amid the Lebanese Civil War, Tuéni travels through a divided land, gathering the stories of people who continue to live, create, believe and pass things on despite everything. Artists, intellectuals, religious leaders and anonymous witnesses speak of their attachment to a land transformed by violence and exile. Through paintings by Rafic Charaf, the work of the Caracalla Dance Theatre, Ziad Rahbani’s piano and stories of everyday life, Maroun Bagdadi creates a sensitive collective portrait of a country struggling to remain itself.

WITH SOURAYA BAGHDADI

With CINEMAMED & BAFF – Beirut Art Film Festival

At ninety, writer Mikhaïl Naïma looks back on the century he has lived through and sheds light on the present.

In 1978, filmmaker Maroun Bagdadi meets the Lebanese writer and poet Mikhaïl Naïma, a member of the Pen League, the first Arabic-language literary society in America. Before the camera, Naïma recalls his childhood in Baskinta, his exile and the encounters that shaped his thinking. Khalil Gibran, friend and fellow traveller, also emerges. But it is in simple moments — a family memory, a conversation with his granddaughter — that the power of a transmission across generations comes into view.

WITH SOURAYA BAGHDADI

With CINEMAMED & BAFF – Beirut Art Film Festival