Directing
A series of experimental short clips that Mohamed Soueid directed while part of the team of TéléLiban, Lebanon’s main public television channel. Initially intended as a special filler program on food and scheduled to be aired during Ramadan in 1994, these 34 films, each five minutes, were turned into a controversial satirical daily series criticizing Lebanese food culture and depicting the ongoing changes impacting postwar Lebanon.
Tango of Yearning (1998) is the first episode of an autobiographical trilogy on postwar Lebanon, later including Nightfall (2000) and Civil War (2002). Taking its title from Tango of Hope, a classic ballad by Nur al-Huda, the film draws from the director’s reflections on war, love, and cinema, as well as his personal experience at the public television channel TéléLiban. Conjuring various snippets of audiovisual archival material, the film is a poetic elegy to film, Beirut’s movie theaters, and a city undergoing radical transformation. Mohamed Soueid has long been a proponent of the experimental video documentary movement in Lebanon, playing a significant role in the country’s creative renaissance since the end of the civil war. Originally trained as a news videographer during the war, the experience offered him a facility with the medium, which he further developed by making non-linear documentary films with a distinctly personal take.
A history of Lebanon’s Shiites, based on personal writings and memoirs. The film retraces the twelfth sect’s journey through Jabal Amel, the Bekaa Valley, Mount Lebanon and Beirut, while while exploring the major events and factors that influenced a people’s existence.
A yearning in an unsettled space that, once, was shared and breathed by two cineastes, living in two different cities, trying to sustain their longing through each other’s scattered images, sounds, and monologues, pieced together in one film, one dialogue, one soul flown away by loneliness and fallen apart like a forsaken angel. Aala kad al shawk - Le Voyage immobile (or As Far as Yearning) is that dialogue-in-progress taking the shape of a film composed by sound, performed by words, perforated by images still in motion. Ghassan Salhab and Mohamed Soueid are embracing a sense of survival. This film is a sixth sense they nurtured in a world that has become faceless. Their film essay is a personal attempt to be two in one. Disguised as men, they walk among men who left behind their shadows.
Is it possible to talk about death in war time? This question is exposed through four people who lost friends and relatives in four different Lebanese regions.
After twenty years of absence, the filmmaker returns to his home town of Ras Baalbeck, Lebanon to remember the life of his grandfather, who had moved there from Homs, Syria many years before.
A remarkable mock-doc that profoundly explores Lebanon's turbulent history through the life and times of a reclusive metal automaton that once was emblematic of the country's hopes and dreams.
Cinema Fouad is a documentary portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman living in Beirut, where she earns a living as a domestic worker and belly dancer. Soueid shows us scenes of El Kurdi’s domestic world: eating, applying make-up, dancing in her bedroom, all while reflecting on her life and experiences. She expresses her desire to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and mourns the death of her lover, a Palestinian freedom fighter. She often alludes to the aggressions she faces outside of her home, and through her adept defiance in the face of some of Soueid’s more goading questions, we recognize the echoing of these aggressions in his role as interviewer.
In 1975, a group of young Lebanese men joined the Palestinian organization “Fateh”. Known as the “Student Brigade”, they took part in the Lebanese Civil War. Some of them were killed, others left the country. Following the Israeli invasion in 1982, Palestinian armed forces left Lebanon. The “Student Brigade” disbanded, and the once young Lebanese fighters have now become old, nursing their solitude with alcohol, poetry, and songs.
These diaries were published the day after the latest war, on March 3, 2026. Not a war of destruction, bloodshed, and live killing, but rather of the pain of loss and inability to return that the Lebanese have inherited through wars, and especially the attachment to what remains of their places and intimate things, which are vulnerable to being erased. Over the past months, these diaries were recorded on a mobile phone and served as an exercise in survival, an attempt to cling to what remained of the images… and songs, the last vestiges of a fading passion.
Mohamed D'abis worked as an assistant director and technician for many independent Lebanese filmmakers. In the winter of 2000, he left his home and never came back. His body was found months later inside an abandoned war-damaged building in Beirut. In this documentary, director Mohamed Soueid reflects on the life and death of his friend and frequent collaborator.
When Jihan was six years old, her father flew to Cairo and never returned. Mansur Rashid Kikhia was the Foreign Minister of Libya, ambassador to the United Nations, and a human rights lawyer. After serving in Qaddafi's increasingly brutal regime, he defected from the government and became a peaceful opposition leader. Kikhia was obsessively loyal to his country but ultimately, his determination to reason with Qaddafi led to his disappearance from a hotel in Egypt in 1993.
In How Bitter Is My Sweet, six characters, two cities, many homelands, the bitter and the sweet of overcoming life’s hardships, are told by everyday people who dwell at the fringes of society and the informal economy. Fragmented and tender, this film is Soueid’s free-style poetic ode to the colloquial chroniclers of war, strife, exile, and place-making.
A son pieces together his father’s revolutionary past from the diary he’s found, painting a portrait of fathers and sons who were revolutionaries during the 1970s. Most interestingly, the film sheds light on the contrast between the lives of men who ached to change the world vs the men who now seek to just get by.
To deal with his insomnia, Mohamed Soueid meets various people and close friends to ask them to tell him stories that could help him get a good night's sleep. After filming for 15 years, the collected rushes have become a film, a series of dreams that have come true and haunted the filmmaker until today.
In The Sky Is Not Always Above, Beirut’s southern suburbs, notorious as a staunch Hezbollah stronghold, are at once a high-security zone, a site of exception vis-a-vis the writ of Lebanese government, and a recurring target for the Israeli army’s warplanes. Shot after the devastating Israeli war in July 2006, Soueid unearths the winding paths of the district’s rich and forgotten history. And during the captivating journey, he crafts an understated homage to John Ford.
In 1975, the Lebanese wars started when Maroun Bagdadi ended his first feature film "Beirutya Beirut". Did the war give an identity to Lebanese cinema? Productions of documentaries, action movies, actor films, co-productions, and emigration. Since 1975, the war has remained a major subject for feature fiIms shot in Lebanon. This is a history of stories about war and cinema.
