The 6th Annual Arab Women in the Arts Honors Lebanese-French Filmmaker and Multimedia Artist Danielle Arbid

By honoring Danielle Arbid, the Annual Arab Women in the Arts continued its mission of celebrating the beautiful diversity that Arab women bring to cinema, again affirming the importance of amplifying their voices. 

Written by Sarah Abraham

The 6th Annual Arab Women in the Arts was held from July 29 to August 2, 2026, in New York City and online, continuing the Arab Film and Media Institute’s annual celebration of groundbreaking Arab women artists whose work has transformed the landscape of cinema and visual storytelling. This year’s edition honored acclaimed Lebanese-French filmmaker and multimedia artist Danielle Arbid, whose fearless body of work has, for nearly three decades, explored memory, war, displacement, sexuality, family, and identity through deeply personal and formally inventive films. By presenting a retrospective spanning Arbid’s career, this year’s program, curated by head of film programming Nanor Vosgueritchian, highlighted the remarkable breadth of her artistic vision while reaffirming the festival’s commitment to championing Arab women whose voices continue to reshape contemporary cinema. 

The festival opened at Anthology Film Archives with Arbid’s celebrated debut feature, In the Battlefields (2004). Set in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, the coming-of-age drama follows twelve-year-old Lina (Marianne Feghali) as she navigates a world fractured by violence, familial instability, and social divisions while forming a powerful bond with her family’s young housekeeper, Siham (Rawia Elchab). Through Lina’s perspective, Arbid captures the emotional realities of conflict not through spectacle, but through the intimate experiences of women and girls whose everyday lives unfold amidst political upheaval. The film serves as an ideal introduction to Arbid’s filmmaking language, establishing many of the themes — including memory, womanhood, class, and survival — that continue to define her work throughout her career. 

Parisienne (2015)

Throughout the festival, audiences were invited to engage further with Arbid’s filmography through additional feature screenings presented across New York City venues, including Nitehawk Cinema, Low Cinema, and Woodbine. The retrospective offered a comprehensive portrait of an artist continually pushing the boundaries between fiction and autobiography while challenging audiences to confront histories that are often left unspoken. 

Among these screenings was Parisienne (2015), a vibrant coming-of-age story following eighteen-year-old Lina (a different character from the previously mentioned film, played by Manal Issa) as she leaves Lebanon to pursue her studies in Paris. Searching for the freedom she struggled to find in her homeland, Lina navigates unfamiliar cultural landscapes, relationships, and questions of identity with resilience and determination. The film expands Arbid’s ongoing exploration of displacement and self-discovery, presenting migration not simply as a geographical journey, but as an emotional search for belonging and autonomy. 

The retrospective also included A Lost Man (2007), one of Arbid’s most psychologically ambitious works. Inspired by the photographic travels of Antoine d’Agata, the film follows a French photographer (Melvil Poupaud) whose pursuit of increasingly extreme experiences leads him into an enigmatic search for memory, identity, and transformation. Through its dreamlike structure and emotionally charged imagery, A Lost Man demonstrates Arbid’s willingness to challenge conventional narrative forms while examining the complexities of human desire and the fragile nature of memory. 

A Lost Man (2007)

Complementing the feature presentations was a special program, Four Shorts by Danielle Arbid, which offered audiences an intimate glimpse into her personal history. Consisting of Nous/Nihna (2005), Allo Cheri (2015), Souvenirs de violence (2020), and I Give My Heart a Medal for Letting Go of You (2021), the collection forms a moving portrait centered on Arbid’s relationships with her father, mother, brother, and herself. Across these four short films, Lebanon remains an ever-present emotional landscape as Arbid reflects on illness, family, war, grief, remembrance, and the elusive nature of truth. Rather than presenting memory as something fixed, the shorts embrace its fragmented and often contradictory qualities, revealing how cinema itself becomes a means of preserving, reconstructing, and reimagining personal history. Together, the program illustrated the deeply personal perspective that has distinguished Arbid’s work throughout her career. 

This year’s retrospective demonstrated the remarkable evolution of Danielle Arbid’s artistic contribution, bringing together films that span more than twenty years of filmmaking while revealing the thematic continuity that connects her work. Whether examining the lasting scars of war, the search for freedom, the complexities of family relationships, or the intersections between memory and imagination, Arbid consistently centers the emotional experiences of women with honesty and compassion. Her films challenge audiences to reconsider conventional narratives surrounding Arab womanhood while embracing ambiguity, vulnerability, and lived experience as sources of artistic power. By honoring Danielle Arbid through an expansive tribute of feature films and short works, the 6th Annual Arab Women in the Arts continued its mission of celebrating the beautiful diversity that Arab women bring to cinema, again affirming the importance of amplifying their voices.