Hisham Bizri

Set in the desolate wreckage of Beirut’s Piccadilly Theater after decades of war, the film recounts three days in the life of a writer and actors. As they seek to revive the ghostly theater with a production of Sophocles’ Elektra, the actors witness the vivid dreams of the writer who has to confront the contempt and lies of the two-faced actors and ultimately her own murder.

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An ode to the fragility of life and the Syrian revolution which started on March 15, 2011.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marxist, Catholic, and gay, plays the role of the director as a conveyor of human experience in this experimental documentary film. The director is constantly watching, thinking, and feeling the world events around him as he films the Passion of Jesus as well as mundane and historic events, all in the hope that the film, once done, will be whole and sufficient to convey human suffering and decadence through interconnections. But on the director is the burden of showing through the art of cinema the human experience of transcendence.

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The fable of an Arab man who is in a perpetual agony of restlessness. He cannot sleep. He keeps to himself, somewhat moody and savage. Life for him is a mystery and it impossible to understand, leading him into melancholic paralysis. His thoughts wander through the vastness of the desert, and at the same time force him to see himself powerless in his petty sphere of action, and powerless from the very mystery of his thought. The embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality of his paralysis is imposed on his pure and noble soul, turning his life into a profound tragedy.

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This is a film poem about love. A Lebanese-American filmmaker photographs a woman in Paris: as a trapeze artist, a model, a lover, and a child. The film attempts to capture that moment between wakefulness and dream. It carries within it melancholy and loneliness, sadness and joy, adulthood and childhood. It evolves out of the metaphor that life is a circular journey whose end is "to arrive at where we started / And know that place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding).

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Asmahan is a film poem about the famous Syrian singer of the same name. The film is made up of four parts: love, death, love, and death. Each part follows one of the two songs Asmahan sings in the film which are used as a structural motif throughout. Like her musical notations, every shot is connected to every other shot. Nearly every shot contains Asmahan (she is the only actor in the film who appears to be talking), which is meant to create an obsessive relationship with the image reminding us of the interplay of voyeurism and exhibitionism that makes the actor that we see on the screen dream like, especially when she also sees us. This dream logic suggests that there is a hidden life, which exists through pictures, lurking in even the most superficial and trite of B-films. It is this fragment-like wholeness that is in a sense the structure of the film. As in a dream, Asmahan's actions are accentuated through a number of strategies.

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Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.

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Set in the desolate wreckage of Beirut’s Piccadilly Theater after decades of war, the film recounts three days in the life of a writer and actors. As they seek to revive the ghostly theater with a production of Sophocles’ Elektra, the actors witness the vivid dreams of the writer who has to confront the contempt and lies of the two-faced actors and ultimately her own murder.

Open details →

Asmahan is a film poem about the famous Syrian singer of the same name. The film is made up of four parts: love, death, love, and death. Each part follows one of the two songs Asmahan sings in the film which are used as a structural motif throughout. Like her musical notations, every shot is connected to every other shot. Nearly every shot contains Asmahan (she is the only actor in the film who appears to be talking), which is meant to create an obsessive relationship with the image reminding us of the interplay of voyeurism and exhibitionism that makes the actor that we see on the screen dream like, especially when she also sees us. This dream logic suggests that there is a hidden life, which exists through pictures, lurking in even the most superficial and trite of B-films. It is this fragment-like wholeness that is in a sense the structure of the film. As in a dream, Asmahan's actions are accentuated through a number of strategies.

Open details →