Abbout Productions

After surviving a car crash in the middle of Lebanon's isolated Beqaa Valley, an amnesiac man finds himself held hostage on a local farm that doubles as an illegal drug-production facility.

Across three decades of passion, loss, and hope, Nino and Yasmina are bound by a magnetic relationship. Torn between love and survival, they must decide whether to build a family in Lebanon or leave their home despite tragedies.

Maia, a single mother, lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex. On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected delivery: notebooks, tapes, and photos Maia, from 13 to 18 years old, sent from Beirut to her best friend who left for Paris to escape the civil war. Maia refuses to open the box or confront its memories, but Alex secretly begins diving into it. Between fantasy and reality, Alex enters the world of her mother’s tumultuous, passionate adolescence during the Lebanese civil war, unlocking mysteries of a hidden past.

Suzanne and Osmane meet in crisis-ridden Beirut. Osmane is a young Sudanese man without papers, searching for a better future; Suzanne is a widow with Palestinian roots more than twice his age. Against all odds, they fall in love.

A hot summer's day in the Gaza Strip. Today the electricity is on. Christine’s beauty salon is heaving with female clients: a bride-to-be, a pregnant woman, a bitter divorcée, a devout woman and a pill-popping addict. But their day of leisure is disrupted when gunfire breaks out across the street. A gangland family has stolen the lion from Gaza’s only zoo, and Hamas has decided it’s time to settle old scores. Stuck in the salon, with the prospect of death drawing ever nearer, the women start to unravel. How will the day end? Will they lose their lives for the sake of “liberating the lion”?

Amal is 14 years old when she ends up on Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution, after the death of her boyfriend in the Port Said Stadium riot. During the protests, she is beaten by police and dragged across the square by her hair. This coming-of-age film follows her over the years after the revolution. As the film cuts between the unfolding current events and Amal’s rapidly changing life and appearance, we see her searching for her own identity in a country in transition. Amal is fiery and fearless, sinking her teeth into the protests and constantly lecturing her mother, who works as a judge. A girl among men, she also has to fight for respect and the right to take part, both in the street and in the rest of her life. In Egypt, even for a young woman like Amal—her name means "hope"—the choices open to her for her future are limited.

Nabil returns to Beirut with the ashes of his father who died abroad. He tries to overcome his bereavement while his family insists on respecting rites and customs by burying a non-existent corpse.

Jamil and Milad are brothers with very different personalities. Jamil is a get-up-and-go carpenter, following in his father's footsteps. Milad is a sensitive trumpeter and dreamer. As their home country, Syria, sinks further into war, Jamil emigrates first to Beirut and then makes an illegal journey to Sweden. Milad stays in Damascus, but eventually can’t take it any longer and decides to leave to Berlin. Their cousin Wissam records their journey for over five years, bringing back childhood memories while questioning the true meaning of home. The traumatic war in Syria plays a background role in this documentary, which focuses more on the psychological effects of being uprooted and the way the brothers, who had previously hardly travelled, deal with emigration. It draws with humility and admiration the human ability to cope with change, as radical as it can be. Jamil and Milad are achievers, each adapting his own way.

In 1970s Greece, two young women free a military raid and take sanctuary in a mysterious convent.

Members of a family quit the polluted, rubbish-strewn city of Beirut for an idyllic mountain home. However, their dreams of a utopian existence are shattered by the construction of a landfill on the boundary of their land.

In 2011 Tunisia, as the Arab Spring awakens, unemployed graduate Aziz, nicknamed Zizou (Zied Ayadi), travels from his Saharan village to the big city of Tunis in search of a job. From television aerial installation to political intrigue, this fresh-faced young Candide will learn the ways of the world, fall in love with the ravishing Aicha (Sara Hanachi), and become famous.--Eddie Cockrell, FilmFest DC

July 2006. Another war breaks out in Lebanon. The directors decide to follow a movie star, Catherine Deneuve and a friend, actor and artist Rabih Mroue;, on the roads of South Lebanon. Together, they will drive through the regions devastated by the conflict. It is the beginning of an unpredictable, unexpected adventure...

On the eve of an invasion in 1982 Lebanon, an 11-year-old boy at a mountain school is determined to express his feelings to a classmate. As tension builds across the country, the day takes an unexpected turn, reflecting the fragile line between innocence and conflict. Through a child's eyes, the film explores the impact of war, the power of love, and the resilience of the human spirit.

In 2023 Lebanon, Aida and her husband struggle to make ends meet after he has loses his job as a private chauffeur. In addition to frequent electricity cuts and her growing boredom as a housewife whose kids have left the nest, Aida can now no longer pay the bills. Through a fortuitous turn of events, she intersects with Saydeh, who works as a film extra and helps enroll Aida in a background casting agency called Paradise. This, in turn, leads Aida to bond with new girlfriends and push back on her increasingly grumpy husband as she redefines the limits Beirut society had set for her.

Each morning Beirut awakens to a new murder seemingly committed by a serial killer, with victims found emptied of their blood. At the same time a doctor, Khalil, begins to experience strange symptoms that destabilise him and transform his life. A connection slowly emerges that seems to link Khalil to these victims. Salhab’s body of films have come to narrate the state of Lebanon – and Beirut in particular – during and after the civil war, and this film is no exception.

The Sabra and Shatila quarters are part of the Lebanese capital Beirut, which was rocked by a violent explosion in 2020, plunging Lebanon into the worst economic crisis in its history. In the poor districts, once provisionally built for Palestinian refugees, the residents live at a subsistence level without papers, without civil rights, without prospects. The documentary weaves the stories of the three families Kujeyje, Daher, Abeed and that of the young father Aboodi Ziani into a searing portrait of life in a city on the brink. The filmmakers accompanied their protagonists over a four-year period between 2018 and 2022 and show how the poorest of the poor firsthand felt the consequences of the gigantic port explosion, Lebanon's historic economic crisis, the corona pandemic and the ever-growing refugee quota. But unmistakable qualities like resilience and hope allow them to survive.

In 1976 Beirut, after a rendezvous with her old flame, soon-to-wed Noha witnesses a violent incident and changes course on a path to self-realization.

Riad, a middle-aged man, holds a firearm shop in a neighbourhood of Beirut. When he meets up with his friends or goes hunting with them, it is often with the aim of evoking together their memories of the civil war fought in the Christian militia. They live in nostalgia for the war that impassioned their youth. Director Myriam El Hajj builds solid architectural images that interrogate — and, perhaps, over time even manage to articulate — the intimate origins of violence that never seems to depart and a past that doesn't want to let go of the present.

The film gives voice to Lebanese teenagers, filmed in different regions of the country - Tripoli, Sidon, Hermel... Coming from different backgrounds, they express themselves on the future, their future, their desires and fears, on their role models, their link to family, politics, memories. They talk with the frankness and funniness of children and yet, also with the maturity of adults. Through a series of simple and open questions, the documentary draws an intimate portrait of today's Lebanese youth.

Strange and life-threatening events in a construction site create tension between the Syrian workers and the Lebanese villagers. Tarek, one of the workers, becomes convinced that the site is haunted.