This is a documentary about the memory of a village from the point of view of the very few villagers still related to this village. "The oak of Ein Trez" is a 26minutes documentary I directed for the program "Memory of a Location" produced by Firehorse Film Productions and broadcast by Future News.
This is a documentary I directed in 2008 about the life and passion for cinema of the well-known Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiry ( West Beyrouth and Lila dit ca ). It was part of a 26minutes program called "with passion" produced by Firehorse Film Production and broadcast by Future News.
Here is Tercom corporate project; a number of short films were presenting Tercom, an agriculture empowerment project in all Lebanese regions in 2008. I produced, directed and edited them. It was shown in private screenings and there were private distribution to promote local traditional and agricultural products.
One of the 6 films was not directed by me but by Hussein Gharib. It was for another organisation that was in collaboration with Tercom : Nowara, a woman empowerment project in Lebanese regions.
directed by Hussein Gharib, produced and edited by me.
In 2011, Nowara decided to give awards to Lebanese entrepreneur women and wished to show films for the awards event. So they asked me as a Lebanese woman to direct those 4 short films as a winner award presentation.
This feature documentary I edited received awards from all around the world. One of them is the CNN Asian Pacific Award for the Best Feature Documentary.
These films, produced by Lebanon's Firehorse Film Productions, have a spiritual feel. They required a careful editorial balance that showed how we can inverse the degrees of insanity and spirituality to achieve the understanding of those religions. Editing them was also an informative experience for me: I learned that Kuwait has Protestants, Lebanon has Bahais and Jordan has Mormons, which I did not know before.
Another documentary I edited in 2004 about Druze Religion and Druze practitioners in Lebanon.
Broadcast by Al Jazeera (52 min - Digital Beta).
The importance was for a spiritual mood, the rhythm was relatively slow and we had time to put silence if we wanted in the scenes.
In 2004, I edited two documentaries for the program "Adab Al Soujoun" which was broadcast on Al Jazeera and produced by Hot Spot Films. Both films dealt with literature written inside prison camps in Lebanon. The poetry and texts written inside the camps were an act of defiance and an act of resistance against the Lebanese and Israeli forces who guarded them - papers and pens were not permitted inside the prisons at that time. In editing these films, I tried to reflect the courage and determination of those prisoners of war.
Although on the same subject, each film had a specific mood. As editor, I took care to listen to the characters difficult and profound experience, and to create moments of silence but also let the film's movement take its own space. They are, after all, films about resistance. I really was affected by their experiences and I tried to structure the images with a certain movement and a discomforting silence.
"12 Angry Lebanese" is a documentary directed by Zeina Daccache. The documentary talks about a theater experience with the prisoners of Roumieh prison in Lebanon known as Catharsis Drama Therapy. It was edited by Michèle Tyan (Djinn House Production) in 2009.
I did the Color Correction and Conforming of this 78 minutes film on Avid Media Composer.
Technically, a few masks were added to lighten or darken some areas with an animation for correcting a movement if necessary. I also changed the color temperature of some ranges to neutralize or valorize them.
The way I thought of adding coloring value to the film was very delicate. The characters were personalized and differenciated and the mood had to follow the feeling that has a clear variation during the film. Telling a crime that I did in front of the camera is surely a very tough moment so the coloring language would be well contrasted to enlarge the difference between clearness and darkness. At contrary while gaining back one's self estime with joyfull moments and meditating moments, the language would leave the grey scale and soften the colors with each others to give a feeling of lightness, of softness. Talking with the therapist and the others about my interior sufferings during a therapy session has different levels and differents dynamics for color correction. This scene had a very important trust element and for this the light had to be clear and soft, but the blacks were very sharp and blocked at some point. Finding homogeneity is necessary though. So when you see too much differences in one same location from a scene to another, the coloring risks to be visible and this was something to avoid. So at some point I had to balance it all.
"Après la guerre, c'est toujours la guerre." Documentary - 80 min - by Samir Abdallah (author of The siege and Writers of the Frontiers)
Extract 1
Extract 2
Extract 3
Projected in the 3 Luxembourgs Cinema in Paris, "After the war, it’s still the war" is a documentary shot in Lebanon during July 2006 war with Israel.
The director is a French militant who came to Lebanon with a delegation of militants during the war to show solidarity to the Lebanese people. The film talks about a newspaper launched by secular leftist well known journalists who will publish their first edition on the last day of war with a questionning manchette on what's after the war.
Lines is a program I edited about product design, interior design and architecture in the world. This part shows a scene shot and edited as a frame by frame scene.
The jazz music for it was a good choice since jazz has a movement feeling, our image movement had an irregular rhythm too.
