‘Amplify our voices’: Lebanese Film Festival comes to Montreal
Posted June 2, 2025 5:52 pm.
A celebration of Lebanese film, music and culture is underway.
The Montreal edition of the Lebanese Film Festival (LFF) in Canada kicked off Saturday.
This year, the ninth edition of the festival is called “Living together through the 7th art.” The festival runs until Thursday.
“We just hope to keep having our stories out there,” said Lebanese filmmaker Sabine Kahwaji. “We want to bring Lebanese voices and cinema into the forefront. And we’re so grateful for LFF for doing that for us, because we want to keep saying these stories.
“It’s so, so important to have our stories here. You don’t see many of our stories in Canada. So the festival, it’s very, very important to amplify our voices.”
The fest aims to introduce a different fact of Lebanese culture to Canadians, to bridge the gap between the two cultures, and emphasize the power of the arts.
It’s also about introducing Lebanese cinema and filmmakers to a North American audience.
“After a few years, it became a bridge between Lebanon and so many communities that they are very interested to come and watch our movies and learn our culture and share with us their point of view,” said Hay-Love Hadchiti, the festival’s founder and president. “And the festival become a safe place to discuss and exchange our opinion and our ideas about all the actuality going on right now.”
Kahwaji’s work is “Altisal,” an 18-minute short film that delves into the experiences of Wissam, Nour, and George, three first-generation Lebanese Canadian siblings living abroad.
“It’s about immigrant mental health,” the filmmaker said. “It’s about a Lebanese family, three siblings in Canada, and an explosion happens in their hometown of Beirut. And their parents are there, and they’re awaiting the survival status, a call about the survival status. So it’s called ‘Alitisal.’ And it’s all about mental health and bringing our mental health stories into the forefront.”
Since premiering in the Lebanese capital at the Beirut International Shore Film Festival, “Alitisal” has been “touring globally,” Kahwaji says. It made itsNorth American premiere at the Beverly Hills International Film Festival.
Hadchiti explains the festival has come a long way since starting in 2017.
“We had in mind only having fun screening movies, enjoy any new selection of Lebanese movies to be really screened on the big screen in Canada,” she said. “Before that we never had any Lebanese movies on the big screen so that was an opportunity for us to highlight the latest movies in the market. Then it became as a mission for us to highlight and talk about our culture, to share our filmmakers’ creative talent with the Canadian audience.”
