7/9/2022
My Heart Beats Only for Her (2008)
86 min | Lebanon | Arabic with English subtitles
Director: Mohammad Soueid
Borrowing its title from one of Fatah’s anthems, Soueid’s third feature-length documentary, My Heart Beats Only for Her, delves into the hardly recorded experience of Fatah’s famous Student Brigade. The film’s structure is essentially a reflection on two generations: a father who dreamed of revolution and fame, Vietnam and Hollywood, and his son, a filmmaker, lost between the superlative mythology of Dubaï and Beirut, once the Arab Hanoi. Soueid mixes elements of autobiography, documentary and fiction to intimate viewers into the lapsed universe of men who were once epic heroes and now are disappeared, lost or anonymous. With this film, we see them for the first time as fathers who see the world their sons have inherited to dream about change and to shape a meaningful life.
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14/9/2022
I Am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth (2004)
92 min | Brazil | Spanish and Portuguese with English subtitles
Director: Vicente Ferraz
The film examines the creation and exhibition of the propaganda film I Am Cuba, a Soviet/Cuban collaboration unknown in the West until the 1990s, and the political upheavals that led to its creation.
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21/9/2022
Houston, We Have a Problem (2016)
98 min | Slovenia, Croatia, Germany, Czech Republic, Qatar | English
Director: Žiga Virc
A docufiction-mockumentary film that explores the myth of the secret multi-billion-dollar deal behind the United States’ purchase of Yugoslavia’s clandestine space program in the early 1960s, offering an allegory to the Cold War.
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28/9/2022
The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)
93 min | Lebanon, France, Qatar | Arabic with English subtitles
Director: Khalil Joreige
In the 1960s, Lebanon was the first Arab country to send rockets into the sky. A small group of students from the Haigazian University (called Haigazian College at the time), led by Manoug Manougian, their physics teacher, launched their first rockets to conquer space under the name the Lebanese Rocket Society. Their work was a source of national pride.