Movies: Omar Amiralay

A young man aspires to follow in his father's footsteps and live up to his legacy of resisting the Zionist occupation. He reflects on his father's journey from his arrival in Quneitra in 1936 to his death after the Zionist army captured the city....

Focusing on key Arab films produced in the last 20 years. Férid Boughedir traces the development of the film-makers' concern to produce more socially aware cinema. Themes include the issue of Palestinian homeland rights and the nature of Arab identit...

The first documentary to present an unabashed critique of the impact of the Syrian government’s agricultural and land reforms, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village delivers a powerful jab at the state’s conceit of redressing social and economic inequiti...

Interviews with Palestinians living in Lebanese refugee camps, some of it shot in Sabra and Shatila before the massacre....

The construction of a dam on the Euphrates River is an example of a country’s economic development. Through grandly composed images, rhythmic editing, and aestheticized details, the director demonstrates his admiration for the interwar avant-garde. T...

The film was based on an interview with the late dramatist Saadallah Wannous a few months before he died of cancer. Wannous narrates his somber and relentless reflections – an adieu to a generation for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the sour...

A look at the Baath party's project to construct a system of dams....

A man recollects the conflict in the middle east through his personal memory. In this short documentary, Amiralay reflects on the first time he heard of Israel. Through recorded conversations with filmmaker Mohamed Malas, both Amiralay and Malas shar...

Trained as an electrician, Nazih Shahbandar became fascinated with the technology behind film production and was one of the pioneers of cinema production in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1947, he set up a studio fitted with film equipment that was almost e...

On 22nd May 1985, Jean-Paul Kaufman and Michel Seurat were kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad on the road to Beirut airport. Seurat died after 8 months of captivity....

Omar Amiralay examines how Yemen's revolution comes to fruition. There is a mix of hope that here perhaps a state will succeed in the socialist project, with the knowledge of how it slipped off at home....

Through mordant social commentary and symbolic irony, Amiralay focuses this film on the chicken farming industry in the rural Syrian village of Sadad. He documents the burdened livelihoods of farmers and the economic policies of the government that e...

Fateh Moudarres (1922-1999) was a crucial personage in Syrian artistic and cultural life, a pioneer of contemporary painting, a literate and prolific novelist. For about forty years has transformed his atelier, located in the center of Damascus, into...

In the year leading up to a 1985 international conference on gender equality in Beijing, filmmakers all over the world took part in a series of documentary films exploring changing relationships between men and women. Amiralay, invited to explore the...

Hajj Ali makes a living as a taxi driver during the day, carrying citizens safely across the city, but he also runs a funeral home, waiting for “customers” to be delivered daily. As he documents one man’s existence in a civil war-ravaged Beirut, Amir...

The Man with the Golden Soles is a Syrian documentary film by the director Omar Amiralay. The film, released in 2000, is about the then Lebanese Prime minister Rafic Hariri...

Directed by Omar Amiralay....