9th Annual Film Festival: Beirut Diaries

October 22, 2013 Staff 2-min. read

Beirut Diaries: Truth, Lies and Videos

A film by Mai Masri

The Middle East Studies Committee and the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies is proud to present the 9th Annual Middle East Film Festival. This year’s theme is REVOLUTION!

Beirut Diaries: Truth, Lies and Videos by Mai Masri is the second of four documentaries about the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the region with selections from Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. Screening are for the next 4 Wednesdays. All films will be shown at 7 PM in the Erdahl Cloyd Theater in the D.H. Hill Library on NC State University’s campus.

9th Annual Middle East Film Festival

TOMORROW, Wednesday, October 23th

7pm at NC State University

In Lebanon, the car-bomb assassination of prime minister Rafik Hafari on February 14, 2005, marked only the onset in a sweeping tide of sociopolitical change that took their country by storm during the late winter and early spring months of that year. These shifts culminated in the Confessional Youth Movement in Beirut’s famous Martyr’s Square, wherein thousands upon thousands of young protesters filled the streets — voicing demands for an official investigation into Hafari’s murder, the instantaneous removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the resignation of the then-current Lebanese governmental administration. Astonishingly (and in the eyes of many, admirably), these protests sprang up in complete defiance of orders issued by the country’s Interior Ministry. With her documentary Mai Masri travels directly to the scene in early 2005 and plunges into the fray, for a firsthand glimpse of the events.