Feature Documentary

Directed, written & edited by Rania Rafei (In Production / Expected in 2025)

The film portrays Tripoli/Lebanon through five revolutionary moments in the history of the city.

Labs & Funding Awards:

Mostra de Valencia (2024)

Production & Post - Production Fund - AFAC (2022 & 2024)

Production Fund - Fondation Liban Cinema (2023)

Production Fund - Red Sea (2023)

Production Fund - Doha Film Institute (2021)

Red Sea Lodge (2021)

La Métive Residence (2021)

Malmo film market (2020)

Feature Documentary

Directed, written & edited by Raed Rafei (2024)

A queer director returns to Tripoli, Lebanon to confront a hometown that once rejected him. He interviews the city’s inhabitants about their cultural and social beliefs and their embrace of new ideas. This contemplative urban symphony paints a picture of a city trapped in a self-spun web, paralyzed by a deep economic crisis, a faltering revolution, and a looming doomsday.

The film will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November.

Short Experimental

Directed & Produced by Raed Rafei (2021)

A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing by the ruins." The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring capitalist and colonial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, archives and ruins, histories of sex, and histories of empire, all commingle in this essay film. What transpires is a web of visible and invisible threads where homosexuality in the Middle East today seems to be enmeshed.

Al-Atlal received an honorable mention at the 32nd Onion City Festival for experimental film and video in Chicago in April 2022.

Al-Atlal was acquired by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in October 2023 and is now part of the museum’s films & videos collection.

For more information, click here.

Short Experimental

Directed, written & edited by Rania Rafei (2021)

A camera tries to find the possibility of a new becoming after the city of Tripoli/Lebanon collapsed politically and economically.

City Rehearsal was shown at the Art-Lab Berlin gallery in the exhibition "Dreaming About a Revolution".

Short Docu-Drama

Directed, written & edited by Raed Rafei (2017)

Salamis a docu-drama that retraces the ordinary afternoon of a working woman in the intimacy of her home. While carrying out household chores, Salam reveals the tumultuous journey of discovering her sexuality in a traditional society. Based on a six-hour-long interview with an anonymous Syrian woman, the film exposes the complex dynamics between desire and patriarchal power structures.

Salam won the prize for the best international short film at the Fribourg International Film Festival in 2017.

For more information, click here.

Feature Documentary

Directed, written & edited by Raed Rafei (2017)

Two men, two contrasting realities, and a quest for a shared future despite a world of physical and imaginary boundaries. This road-trip documentary that explores the depths of a transnational gay relationship in today's world. Set between Lebanon and Italy, this essay film is a poetic collage of fragments from a personal archive of shared moments: still travel photos, ambient sounds, and videos of everyday instances. Through conversations between the filmmaker and his partner, this film raises questions of love, commitment, familial trauma, European border restrictions, LGBT rights, and ongoing persecution all within the contours of a shimmering queer utopia.

Eccomi ... Eccoti is discussed in Viola Shafik’s new book, Resistance, Dissidence, Revolution: Documentary Film Esthetics in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge Studies in Middle East Film and Media, 2023).

Eccomi ... Eccoti screened at film festivals in the United States, The Netherlands, Germany, and other places.

For more information, click here.

TV Documentary

Directed by Rania Rafei (2016)

The story of Canada’s residential school system and the indigenous survivors who bear witness to its abuses.

Canada's Darkest Secret was screened by Al Jazeera English.

Documentary Installation (2014)

As in few other cities Beirut have risen from civil war and invasion and regained its economic development over and over again. However the huge urban development projects undertaken by private stakeholders in recent years are rarely rooted in the citizens needs. Meanwhile, Beiruts city map and its development is strongly characterized by a division between the country’s different ethnic groups.

The video installation was shown at the Fargfabriken Museum for Art and Architecture in Stockholm, at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale and the Antalia Architecture Biennale.

Feature Docu-Drama

Directed by Rania & Raed Rafei (2012)

This award-winning film revisits a student uprising from the 1970s against an increase in tuition fees. In 1974, the students of the American University of Beirut occupied university offices for 37 days protesting American imperialism in the Middle East and calling for the democratization of education and social justice.

Recalling this event, the film tackles the core issues of revolution and democracy with an eye on the recent changes that swept through the Arab region.

The film uses re-enactments and theatrical improvisations giving voice to young activists to embody the successes and failures of the leftist movement of the 1970s.

“It is a beautiful film, the characters bathed in light, the camerawork expressive, the performances passionate.” Laura U. Marks, Hanan al-Cinema: Affectations for the Moving Image.

74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) premiered at the FID Marseille International Film Festival where it received the GNRC prize. It also won the prize for best film at the Curitiba International Film Festival in Brazil in 2013. Learn more about the film here.

For more information, visit the film's official website.

Feature Experimental

Directed & written by Rania & Raed Rafei (2011)

Based on speculative improvisations, the film asks young political activists to imagine the day students in March 1974 occupied the office of the president of the American University of Beirut.

Prologue was first screened at Ashkal Alwan's Video Works in 2011 in Beirut and was screened later in venues in New York and Italy. In 2021, Prologue was part of the Making Revolution exhibition in Montreal.

For more information, click here.