Directed by Rita Baghdadi • Documentary • With Lilas Mayassi, Shery Bechara • 2022 • 80 minutes
SIRENS intimately chronicles the lives and music of Slave to Sirens, a band made up of five young metalheads whose burgeoning fame is set against the backdrop of the Lebanese revolution. Its members wrestle with friendship, sexuality, and destruction as their music serves as a refuge to Beirut’s youth culture.
At the band’s core are its two founding members, Lilas Mayassi and Shery Bechara, whose complicated relationship and subsequent tense fallout threatens the very fabric of the band. An even greater looming threat, however, is Lebanon’s criminalization of homosexuality, as well as the wholly devastating effects of their country’s political regime. Despite their obvious challenges, the members of Slave to Sirens persist in trying to create a revolution of their own: living their truth.
Up Next in Lebanon
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Skies of Lebanon
Directed by Chloé Mazlo • Drama • With Alba Rohrwacher, Wajdi Mouawad, Isabelle Zighondi • 2020 • 92 minutes
A poetic blending of the personal and political, Skies of Lebanon combines live action with animation to create a vivid picture of Lebanon, inspired by the family history of filmmaker Chl...
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Tadmor
Directed by Monika Borgmann and Lokman Slim • Documentary • 2016 • 103 minutes
Amidst the popular uprising in Syria that begin in 2011, a group of former Lebanese detainees of the Assad regime decides to break their long-held silence about the horrific years they spent imprisoned in Tadmor (Palm...
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We Loved Each Other So Much
Directed by Jack Janssen • Documentary • 2004 • 80 minutes
For half a century, the Lebanese singer Fairuz has been a living legend in the Arab world. Her home is Beirut, once a thriving seaport known as "the Paris of the Middle East," and a haven for those fleeing religious or ethnic persecution...
