Lebanon's film scene takes the spotlight at London's Garden Cinema

Beyond the usual headlines, a different Lebanon comes into view. It's shaped by memory, humour, and the rhythm of daily life. At The Garden Cinema in London, the UK’s first full season of Lebanese films invites audiences not to turn away from crisis but to look more closely. These films move beyond the familiar frames of war and trauma, offering something more layered. They hold onto life, to contradiction, and to everything that makes it complicated and real.

The season, titled Reclaiming Storytelling, is the result of a collaboration between film programmers Abla Kandalaft and Claire Nicolas of Films of Resistance.

"We were quite keen to have a spotlight on older films and what they said about the history of the country, but we realised that we couldn't include those and very contemporary short films from Beirut Film Society... If we were to have a coherent season, that wasn't going to be incredibly long," Abla tells The New Arab.

The idea of a historical arc, spanning several decades, was set aside for now to make room for a sharper, more immediate focus on contemporary stories that resist reductive narratives.

"Given the geopolitical context, we really wanted to be able to show just contemporary stories of people's lives within that context," she explains. "So that we move away from very reductive visions of what Lebanon is and what it is like, what its people are like."

Abla was inspired by the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival's recent spotlight on Lebanon, which she says "planted a seed", leading her to think: "Maybe we can build on this and create a longer season of feature films that carries the same spirit of spotlighting the country."

Around the same time, filmmaker Maria Abdelkarim of the Beirut Film Society approached Abla with the idea of hosting a small Lebanese film festival in London.

Abla saw an opportunity to bring these threads together. "These three factors made me think, well, how about I develop a proper season? And within that season, the Beirut Film Society can have its own mini programme." And so, a season took shape.

The result is a vivid and carefully curated journey through Lebanese cinema. It unfolds over several weeks with screenings, Q&As, live music, and the warm familiarity of mezza and Lebanese wine.

The programme moves from raw shorts to sharp satire, from slow-burning drama to joyful crowd-pleasers. It resists any singular narrative and instead extends a simple invitation. It asks audiences to come and see what Lebanese filmmakers see.

"Cinema is a prime medium for storytelling," says Abla. "Cinema allows us to listen to people's stories that, in a very good way, as you're sitting there, silent, taking in for two or so hours what someone else is telling you."

As Abla puts it, "Conflict is not necessarily a defining element in these films, and traumatic periods serve more as omnipresent backdrops." There’s space, instead, for irony, absurdity, experimentation and even joy.

"Lebanese cinema is often self-referential, elliptical, and darkly funny," she says. "It reflects a society that keeps ploughing on, and finds resilience in humour and art."

Crucially, the selection avoids films tailored solely to international audiences. "We tried to bypass restrictive co-production and distribution conditions and show films where the filmmakers have really gone full guerrilla style... despite their circumstances, to tell those stories," Abla explains. "And the films we show also show a variety. Like most countries, it's very diverse. Opinions are diverse. There's no one line. And those films reflect that."

The season opens with Panorama, a striking selection of award-winning shorts from the past decade. Among them: Ely Dagher’s Palme d’Or-winning Waves '98, Wissam Charaf’s surreal If the Sun Drowned Into an Ocean of Clouds, and the slyly comic Sisters of the Rotation. The programme runs twice on 7 June, with Lebanese wine and sampler plates from Beirut Garden served between screenings.

Diasporic stories take the stage in Lebanon in the UK, a short programme spotlighting women filmmakers based in London, unfolding on 9 and 16 June. The Beirut Film Society's involvement culminates in two screenings for their Lebanon Cinema Days in the UK strand: a shorts showcase on 7 July, and the 2016 Oscar submission Void (Waynon) on 11 July, a moving meditation on six women waiting for loved ones lost to Lebanon's wars.

Between these, a string of narrative features adds richness and variety. There's the UK premiere of Arze (13 June), led by Diamand Bou Abboud in a performance that has already charmed festival audiences. In Heaven Without People (19 June), Lucien Bourjeily dissects family and politics with biting dialogue, the screening prefaced by a live oud performance. Then comes All This Victory (30 June and 2 July), Ahmad Ghossein's tense wartime chamber piece, introduced by researcher Jamal Awar, who offers context on the Civil War and the cinematic language it birthed.

The programme doesn’t shy away from documentary either. Sirens (21 June), a bold portrait of Lebanon's first all-female queer metal band, screens as a fundraiser, preceded by a souk of crafts and snacks. The enduring appeal of Nadine Labaki's Caramel (25 June, 9 July) returns by popular demand with its warm, bittersweet world of beauty salons, friendship, and small defiance still as luminous as ever.

And in a gesture of transnational solidarity, Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon (4 July) anchors the season in collective memory. Co-directed by Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri and Jean Chamoun, the film explores resistance through the lens of women's lives. It will be introduced by Dr Kareem Estefan, who will speak to the intertwined histories of Lebanon and Palestine.

This is not a season that tries to simplify Lebanon. It does not try to explain it away or package it neatly. Instead, it holds space for contradiction and subtlety, for beauty and grief to sit side by side. In Abla's words, it's about "spotlighting the country" in all its cinematic light and shadow.

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