2012 has been a year of heated controversies, polemics and human rights violations for the LGBT community in Lebanon. In May Human Rights Watch denounced the performance of invasive tests to determine homosexuality on detainees and ordered by the (...)
A controversy started on August 20 when the Montreal chapter of Lebanese-Canadian LGBT-rights organization HELEM condemned in an open letter the scheduled performances of Lebanese singer Mohamed Eskander in Canada, to take place on Saturday and (...)
Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, part of the larger Arab Spring, also filmmakers have been on the death row of the Syrian regime, together with other artists, journalists and activists.
Before the first public demonstrations (...)
One of the greatest catalyzers for the cause of human rights, freedom of speech and freedom in general in Lebanon has been art. It is often the case that Lebanese artists, perhaps not so much out of advocacy, but with their own work, challenge the (...)
Early in June, with the beginning of the summer, as visitors prepared for holidays in the shores of the Mediterranean, a couple of LGBT-sites ran features on Lebanon, describing it as a melting pot of cultures from East and West, and praised its (...)
“The American Soldier": That is the title of a traveling photographic exhibition that has been on the road since 2007, capturing unusual scenes from nine wars, since the Civil War – one of the first armed conflicts to be widely photographed – to the (...)
BEIRUT: In his book “The Human Province", Elias Canetti notes how “It is only in exile, that one realizes to what an important degree the world has always been a world of exiles"; it is but with this predicament in mind that one objects to the whole (...)
Loneliness has been one of the oldest topics in cinema. This isn't surprising for an art form that was born out of a century pregnant with the dissolution of the traditional community and whose experience – different from criticism – required a type (...)
BEIRUT: “The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions." With this statement, Susan Sontag summed up in 1966 the mood that would define the next half century of art. She speaks about modern art's chronic habit of displeasing, (...)
The news of the destruction of an archaeological site presumed to be an ancient Phoenician port in downtown Beirut, estimated to be as old as the 5th century BC, took many Lebanese by surprise and in particular the Association for the Protection of (...)
BEIRUT: From all the contradictions that Lebanon is fraught with – the land of Hezbollah, Nadine Labaki and Amin Maalouf, at the same time – there is one that always stands unchallenged in the mind of the Arab world: That of Lebanon as an oasis of (...)
Cultural destruction and Lebanon have become synonymous. Since the end of the Civil War, in spite of the constant calls for reconciliation and the projects of reconstruction – albeit limited mostly to one district in Beirut – the destruction of the (...)
“A city and a nation of conservatism and intolerance”: Those are the words used by Samer Daboul to describe Lebanon and the city of Zahlé, in the Bekaa Valley, against the background of which his 2011 full length motion picture is set.
One of the (...)
CAIRO: In “Aesthetics of Silence” (1967) Susan Sontag writes: “Every era has to re-invent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment, aimed at resolving the painful structural conditions (...)
CAIRO: “All films are the same.” That is what Um Salman (Huda Sultan) told her husband Bu (Mubarak Khamis) on a certain night while watching a film on TV, after he had asked her if they hadn't seen that movie before.
The question is two-fold: On (...)
CAIRO: “Who would leave the sea and build his house in the desert?” is the question posed by Hussain, lifelong friend of Mohammed, the main character in “The Good Omen” (Al Bishara), a short-film from Bahrain by director Mohammed Rashed Bu Ali and (...)
From late 1917 until 1919, Franz Kafka wrote entries in his diary in octavo-sized notebooks that remained in relative obscurity. In the third octavo notebook he jotted down the following note:
“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This (...)
In his book about the modern legal tradition, “The Gift of Science”, American philosopher Roger Berkowitz, offers us a glimpse – somewhat academic but not without a spirit of its own – into the failure of science – or of rationality, to be more (...)
More than one year after the revolution, there is little hope for emancipation and full equality before the law for the LGBT population in Tunisia. Even though Tunisia counted with a strong civil society, somewhat more developed than that in (...)
Daniel Zamudio, 24, was assaulted by a Neo-Nazi group in Santiago de Chile. Zamudio was found in the early morning on Saturday, severely injured, around Parque San Borja, in downtown Santiago.
He remains in critical condition at Posta Central (...)
In his book “Trial by Ink”, Egyptian writer Yahia Lababidi offers us an intimate look into the world of self-censorship and sexual morality in the Arab world from the perspective of a man himself and he begins his reflection by speaking with brutal (...)
The status of films among the arts has been more or less settled for a few decades now. The verdict passed on the film industry as the seventh art, however, has little to do with the resolution of a century-old question as much as with a certain (...)
It is said that the numbers of the once prominent Jewish community in Yemen are dwindling fast, especially after the revolution during which a number of Jews had to flee from hostility in the northern province of Sa'ada. The number of Jews left in (...)
The history of thought and the history of music are not the same. While thoughts always require adjectives to qualify them and yet are immune to the effect of such qualifications; the adjectives that apply to music are in most of the cases (...)
Maikel Nabil,
Weeks have passed since you were finally released from imprisonment, and one might think that those weeks turned into years – for greater than before have been the horrors to which we have been exposed since then – making us (...)