Half way through the festival, Ellen Hardy considers its opening film, ‘Every Day is a Holiday’, and the themes reflected in subsequent screenings.

Every night since the opening of the festival last Thursday, Empire Metropolis Sofil has been humming with hundreds of filmgoers from Beirut and all over the world, all come to delight in the strong showing of important films from the Arab region. More than one venerable white-headed director has commented with delight on the youthful profile of the audience, and more than one has further remarked that Beirut could teach their home countries a thing or two about artistic appreciation. Beirut, it is clear to all, is a buzzing hive of ideas and engagement. This, as Festival director Hania Mroue remarked in this series’ opening interview, is what Beirut DC has always loved about the city, what it wanted to reflect and be a part of.

Audience reactions to Dima el Horr’s film ‘Every Day is a Holiday’, which opened the festival and  which will also have a general release in October, have been mixed. One of the film’s actors told me el Horr ‘succeeded in what she aimed to do – create a nightmarish experience in film, not a normal one,’ and while people are ready to agree, there is less consensus on the cinematic pleasures of the – undoubtedly good-looking and sophisticated – final product. Abstraction and impressionism are vital elements of a regional cinema that takes its artistic credentials seriously and is constantly seeking to push conceptual boundaries – art crowd darling Jocelyne Saab is the example that comes immediately to mind. Dima el Horr’s jarring, momentous tale of three women wandering the Lebanese outback, though shot through with wicked shafts of humour, is not a cohesive narrative – it seeks to express surreal, dreamlike elements of women’s postwar identity and experience through poignant moments in their interior worlds.

As such, Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya does not feel the need to pander to its audience’s comfort zone. ‘Don’t relax!’ The program seems to instruct, ‘Nor self-congratulate! There is still a lot of work to do!’ Michel Khleifi’s first film, ‘Fertile Memory’, and his last ‘Zindeeq’, spanning the Palestinian director’s thirty-year career, both shown at Ayam, are immensely moving contemplations of memory that bring the viewer squarely face-to-face with the small lived realities of life under occupation. Farouk Beloufa’s ‘Nahla’, shown in Lebanon for the first time thirty years after it was filmed here, is an arresting, hypnotic piece of filmmaking, as terribly fractured as the structures and relationships it documents being shattered by Lebanon’s civil war. These films and others have carried the festival’s flag with pride.

Still to look forward to, among many others, are Maher Abi Samra’s exploration of ideology and friendship in post-war Lebanon, ‘We Were Communists’, Nada Abdelsamad’s moving documentary of memory and lost community, ‘The Jews of Lebanon’, Ghassan Salhab’s much-anticipated work in progress ‘The Mountain’, the day of screenings for Palestine in the New Cinema and Olivier Assayas’ five-hour biopic ‘Carlos’. There are also a raft of other films, presentations and workshops. The word on the street is full of enthusiasm and anticipation, even or especially for a program that offers little in terms of light relief.

By this measure, Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya is already a roaring success, while still being a festival that takes itself very seriously, and whose vision of the region is still dominated by the political and artistic need to engage and challenge in the least comfortable political, artistic and emotional spaces. Memory, femininity, suffering and resistance – ‘Every Day is a Holiday’ was a well-chosen opening film, pulling together many of the strands of the Arab Cinema heritage and contemporary explorations that the festival as a whole is concerned with. There is, to be sure, much more to learn in the coming days.