12|08|2022 By Ellie Sennett The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, will kick off the Arab Film Festival on Friday. Home to one of the largest Arab-American communities in the country, some consider Dearborn to be the “Arab capital” of the US and the museum has been devoted to documenting, preserving and presenting the history, culture and contributions of the community since 2005. The annual festival will run from August 12 to 21, with a line-up featuring everything from live-action comedy shorts to full-length features, animation and even documentaries tackling America's Israel bias. One of the films in this year's set is When Beirut Was Beirut from writer-director Alessandra El Chanti. The short is a “poetic hybrid documentary” that focuses on an imagined conversation between three famous buildings in the Lebanese capital and what they witnessed during the country's civil war. The film, which began production in 2020, was produced entirely over Zoom by an all-Lebanese team of six artists. Many of the films at this year's festival will be making their US or Michigan state debut, Mr Serio said. Ms El Chanti hopes members of the Lebanese diaspora watching her film at the festival walk away feeling “there's a lot that you should learn about your country that you don't know about — it literally could be from the perspective of anything and everything”.
