Mohamed Soueid

The Insomnia of A Serial Dreamer

Mohamed Soueid

To deal with his insomnia, Mohamed Soueid meets various people and close friends to ask them to tell him stories that could help him get a good night's sleep. After filming for 15 years, the collected rushes have become a film, a series of dreams that have come true and haunted the filmmaker until today.

تانقو الأمل

Mohamed Soueid

Tango of Yearning (1998) is the first episode of an autobiographical trilogy on postwar Lebanon, later including Nightfall (2000) and Civil War (2002). Taking its title from Tango of Hope, a classic ballad by Nur al-Huda, the film draws from the director’s reflections on war, love, and cinema, as well as his personal experience at the public television channel TéléLiban. Conjuring various snippets of audiovisual archival material, the film is a poetic elegy to film, Beirut’s movie theaters, and a city undergoing radical transformation. Mohamed Soueid has long been a proponent of the experimental video documentary movement in Lebanon, playing a significant role in the country’s creative renaissance since the end of the civil war. Originally trained as a news videographer during the war, the experience offered him a facility with the medium, which he further developed by making non-linear documentary films with a distinctly personal take.

Nightfall

Mohamed Soueid

Carmen Lebbos, Elias Khoury

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) student brigade included leftist students from Lebanon who mobilized around the struggle for the liberation of Palestine in the early 1970s. With the departure of the PLO’s armed forces from Lebanon after the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, the brigade was disbanded. Mohamed Soueid was part of the group, and as the Lebanese civil war ended, he decided to film them and revisit their shared sites of memory, drawing a raspy-voiced portrait of defeated militants infused with poetry and generously doused in alcohol.

The Sky Is Not Always Above

Mohamed Soueid

In The Sky Is Not Always Above, Beirut’s southern suburbs, notorious as a staunch Hezbollah stronghold, are at once a high-security zone, a site of exception vis-a-vis the writ of Lebanese government, and a recurring target for the Israeli army’s warplanes. Shot after the devastating Israeli war in July 2006, Soueid unearths the winding paths of the district’s rich and forgotten history. And during the captivating journey, he crafts an understated homage to John Ford.

حرب أهلية

Mohamed Soueid

Mohamed D'abis worked as an assistant director and technician for many independent Lebanese filmmakers. In the winter of 2000, he left his home and never came back. His body was found months later inside an abandoned war-damaged building in Beirut. In this documentary, director Mohamed Soueid reflects on the life and death of his friend and frequent collaborator.

Ma hataftu li ghayriha

Mohamed Soueid

A son pieces together his father’s revolutionary past from the diary he’s found, painting a portrait of fathers and sons who were revolutionaries during the 1970s. Most interestingly, the film sheds light on the contrast between the lives of men who ached to change the world vs the men who now seek to just get by.

سحر الغائب

Mohamed Soueid

A history of Lebanon’s Shiites, based on personal writings and memoirs. The film retraces the twelfth sect’s journey through Jabal Amel, the Bekaa Valley, Mount Lebanon and Beirut, while while exploring the major events and factors that influenced a people’s existence.

Aala Kad Al Shawk - Le Voyage Immobile

Mohamed Soueid, Ghassan Salhab

Absence

Mohamed Soueid

Is it possible to talk about death in war time? This question is exposed through four people who lost friends and relatives in four different Lebanese regions.

How Bitter My Sweet

Mohamed Soueid

In How Bitter Is My Sweet, six characters, two cities, many homelands, the bitter and the sweet of overcoming life’s hardships, are told by everyday people who dwell at the fringes of society and the informal economy. Fragmented and tender, this film is Soueid’s free-style poetic ode to the colloquial chroniclers of war, strife, exile, and place-making.

Cinema Fouad

Mohamed Soueid

Khaled El Kurdi

Cinema Fouad is a documentary portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman living in Beirut, where she earns a living as a domestic worker and belly dancer. Soueid shows us scenes of El Kurdi’s domestic world: eating, applying make-up, dancing in her bedroom, all while reflecting on her life and experiences. She expresses her desire to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and mourns the death of her lover, a Palestinian freedom fighter. She often alludes to the aggressions she faces outside of her home, and through her adept defiance in the face of some of Soueid’s more goading questions, we recognize the echoing of these aggressions in his role as interviewer.

Being Camelia

Mohamed Soueid

A series of experimental short clips that Mohamed Soueid directed while part of the team of TéléLiban, Lebanon’s main public television channel. Initially intended as a special filler program on food and scheduled to be aired during Ramadan in 1994, these 34 films, each five minutes, were turned into a controversial satirical daily series criticizing Lebanese food culture and depicting the ongoing changes impacting postwar Lebanon.

Destinée

Mohamed Soueid

After twenty years of absence, the filmmaker returns to his home town of Ras Baalbeck, Lebanon to remember the life of his grandfather, who had moved there from Homs, Syria many years before.

As Far as Yearning

Ghassan Salhab, Mohamed Soueid

A yearning in an unsettled space that, once, was shared and breathed by two cineastes, living in two different cities, trying to sustain their longing through each other’s scattered images, sounds, and monologues, pieced together in one film, one dialogue, one soul flown away by loneliness and fallen apart like a forsaken angel. Aala kad al shawk - Le Voyage immobile (or As Far as Yearning) is that dialogue-in-progress taking the shape of a film composed by sound, performed by words, perforated by images still in motion. Ghassan Salhab and Mohamed Soueid are embracing a sense of survival. This film is a sixth sense they nurtured in a world that has become faceless. Their film essay is a personal attempt to be two in one. Disguised as men, they walk among men who left behind their shadows.