MIGUEL’S WAR
(أعنَف حُب)
dir. Eliane Raheb, 2021
123 mins. Lebanon/Germany/Spain.
In Arabic, Spanish and French with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, MARCH 5 – 7PM followed by Q+A with filmmaker Eliane Raheb moderated by Ginou Choueiri (Director of Film Programs, ArteEast)
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 12 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 21 – 7:30 PM

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MIGUEL’S WAR is the story of a gay man who grew up oppressed and shamed during the Lebanese civil war. Raised by a conservative Catholic father and an authoritarian Syrian mother, teenage Miguel was inhibited by a deep inferiority complex and was incapable of asserting himself. In 1983 the deeply sensitive boy, desperate to prove he “exists” and can act like “a real man” joined the fighting as part of an armed faction. But his experience was a failure. Traumatized he immigrates to Madrid, Spain. In post-Franco Madrid, Miguel seeks to liberate himself through debauchery. A string of destructive relationships lead him to a failed suicide. Trying to pull himself together, Miguel becomes a conference interpreter in Barcelona. Only then, thirty-seven years after leaving Lebanon, Miguel feels ready to face his trauma and the ghosts of his past, and hopes to regain his emotional balance and maybe even find love. Using intertwining cinematic forms, melding documentary, animation, theater and archive and filmed on location in Lebanon and Spain, this feature film hopes to offer an experience of self-confrontation, awareness and catharsis.

“MIGUEL’S WAR is possibly the first filmic document of the largely concealed lives of gay Arabs in the 1970s – a searing character study of guilt, agonisingly suppressed carnality, and the myriad ways in which people lie to themselves and create false narratives to cope with their PTSD.” – Joseph Fahim, Middle East Eye

“The film breathes new life into the literary genre of the anti-hero’s odyssey, tracing a
living map of witty turns and returns, inward journeys, and cross-Mediterranean escapes, excavating a set of dark events and lurid fantasies in the turbulent consciousness of a Lebanese gay man. MIGUEL’S WAR will disappoint those looking for a hero’s journey from East to West, shame to Pride, repression to freedom. This game-changing new film is so much more than that. Instead, we encounter a lush fabric of tricks and teases.” – Paul Amar, Los Angeles Review of Books

Programmed in collaboration with ArteEast. Special thanks to Ginou Choueiri and Eliane Raheb.

ELIANE RAHEB is the creator and director of several award-winning short films and documentaries. Her recent work includes SLEEPLESS NIGHTS (5th in Sight and Sound magazine’s listings of the best documentaries of 2013) and THOSE WHO REMAIN, screened in over 60 film festivals and winner of the prestigious Etoile de la Scam award. She is the founder of ITAR Productions, a company that has produced award- winning documentaries broadcast on ARTE/ZDF, France 3, France 24, NHK, Al Jadeed and the Al Jazeera Documentary channel, and screened in international film festivals worldwide. Raheb is a founding member of the “Beirut DC” Association for Cinema and is the six-time artistic director of its film festival “Beirut Cinema Days”. Raheb has lectured on Arab cinema and screened her films at universities worldwide including Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and George Mason.

GINOU CHOUEIRI is the Director of Film Programs at ArteEast.  She is also an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She completed an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths University in London with high distinction.  In her artistic research, she looks at how complex and often conflicting histories can be reinterpreted, and alternative futures imagined through new forms of storytelling. Her creative documentary film “Rhythm of  Forgetting”  premiered at DocLisboa, and won several awards such as the Goldsmiths Warden’s prize, special jury mention at DokuBaku, and Best Director Award at Beirut Women’s International Film Festival.