All BFC workshops are canceled for summer 2026 so our community can focus on supporting one another and those affected by the war in Lebanon, while we look for ways to keep teaching. We are also welcoming a renewed board as three members step down and three join.

Storytelling is my metaphysical act of weaving broken memories into living threads. From Beirut rooftops to vegan kitchens, I trace unseen connections between animals, refugees, machines—and us. My films, ethics, and activism are one practice: refusing hierarchies, choosing compassion, and holding space where opposites meet. Liberation is indivisible; until every form of life is honored, I’ll keep filming, cooking, and loving—frame by frame, seed by seed.

Teaching was never a career plan—it was a calling. After navigating life on the margins, I couldn’t ignore the others still stuck there. I teach not to fix, but to reflect, to walk beside my students as they discover their voices. At the Beirut Film Center, we didn’t build an institution—we built a home, where craft meets consciousness, and where education becomes liberation. In every workshop and conversation, I carry the quiet belief that we can reimagine the systems that failed us—and create spaces that truly see us.

Filmmaking is not just a craft but a language of survival, resistance, and healing, an urgent, intimate act of witnessing that transforms silence into meaning and invisibility into presence.

I was never the rebel shouting from rooftops. Mine was a quieter defiance—one that refused to be erased. Written off early, I wasn’t failing—I was just learning in ways no one could measure. While others memorized answers, I chased the questions no one thought to ask. I didn’t just absorb knowledge—I transformed it. Over time, my silence turned into substance, my curiosity into clarity. I became known not for volume, but for depth. Not for rebellion, but for reinvention. What began as survival became mastery—and I emerged not loud, but undeniable.

I wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until I was sixteen. By then, the damage had already been done not just by the condition itself, but by the silence surrounding it. In post-war Lebanon, things like learning differences weren’t discussed… they were dismissed, denied, shamed. Mental health was taboo. Neurodivergence had no language. You were either “smart” or “stupid,” and I had been labeled the latter more times than I could count.

I was born in 1977, two years after the Lebanese “Civil” War erupted and thirteen years before it officially “ended.” But for me, it never really did. It just changed form. The warlords who tore the country apart became our political leaders. The militias traded fatigues for suits. And the systems of violence mutated into economic exploitation, social hierarchies, sectarian conditioning, and everyday corruption. There was no reconciliation, no justice, no reckoning. Just a quiet, national agreement to forget. A false peace built on unspoken wounds. A collective amnesia that I could never abide with.

For two weeks in the summer of 2024, the Beirut Film Center came alive with the energy, curiosity, and creative spark of young aspiring filmmakers. The Basic Filmmaking Bootcamp welcomed participants aged 16 to 25

In the heart of Beirut, a profound transformation story unfolded—a journey that melded creativity, teamwork, and the unbridled spirit of filmmaking. Over a mere span of two weeks, 14 individuals, spanning ages from 16 to 40, embarked on an odyssey […]