Movies: Michèle Tyan

Iman, a young newly wed Palestinian bride, is arrested and incarcerated in a top-security Israeli prison where she gives birth to a baby boy. As she struggles to survive and raise her child behind bars, she is torn between her instinct as a mother an...

A delicate portrait of Mei Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army in Beirut, Fusako Shigenobu....

In the sweltering Arabian Gulf heat Ananda’s dreams of a better life than the one she left behind in India are shattered after her child is forgotten on a school bus. Armed with the dead child’s ashes, she stands up against society’s ‘invisible’ cast...

With EMBERS, Tamara Stepanyan’s first feature-length documentary, the director seeks to honour the memory of her late grandmother, whom she was named after. Stepanyan visits the elder Tamara’s hometown in Armenia, where she spends time with her grand...

Two young girls of the war generation, Yasmin and Leila, are in search of Beirut. When they meet an elderly film enthusiast with a secret store of Lebanese films, they persuade him to screen his collection for them. So begins an initiation into the m...

It's autumn. A man and a woman are about to leave a restaurant situated in the heart of the Lebanese mountains. They are suprised by fighter planes screaming past at low altitude. In the distance, war seems to be breaking out once more. Losing sight ...

For 15 months, 45 inmates, some completely illiterate, worked together to present an adaptation of Reginald Rose's famous stage play 12 Angry Men....

Each morning Beirut awakens to a new murder seemingly committed by a serial killer, with victims found emptied of their blood. At the same time a doctor, Khalil, begins to experience strange symptoms that destabilise him and transform his life. A con...

In 2012, after a 10 months drama therapy workshop, the women inmates of a Beirut prison presented their play Scheherazade in Baabda inside prison to the audience. This film follows the women during these 10 months. The women tell their stories showin...

Acclaimed director Jean Chamoun looks at the lives and works of some of the women who have joined in the fight for their Palestinian homeland. We learn of young resistance fighter Kifah Afifi’s experience as a survivor of the 1982 Shatila massacre in...

During the Lebanese civil war, thousands of people disappeared. In most cases, the bodies were not found and the circumstances of their disappearance never known. Today, I travel through Beirut, asking the inhabitants I encounter, one same question: ...

"Born in Palestine. Died in Lebanon." "Born in Palestine. Died in Syria." "Born in Palestine. Died in Jordan." The camera pans across an endless row of white tombstones. The Shadow of Absence takes death as its subject yet in doing so presents a powe...