Sélim Mourad

Shapes of Normal Human Beings

Three friends take an 8-day road journey to make sense of Lebanon at this moment in time. Each detour in their journey makes for a spectacular experience of co-narration and listening in the face of uncertainty.

Tea with Adonis

Adonis is a queer seventy-three-year-old man. He currently lives in the Ashrafieh district of Beirut. He continues to water his numerous plants daily and host his numerous friends for cheerful dinners every other week. Adonis is full of stories from the sixties, seventies, eighties and the nineties. Though he did not live continuously in the country, he has been travelling the world, with constant visits to his homeland. Conversations with him can easily switch from academic intricacies to plain old gossip about sexual matters or unresolved crimes. Ameer is a thirty-something younger man who wants to gather stories and anecdotes from Adonis. He feels the Lebanese queer past hasn’t been archived well enough so he views Adonis as the golden hen. However, when he notices Adonis has it easier to be physically nude than to reveal the full nudity of his feelings, he starts feeling frustrated. What else to expect, would Adonis say, from someone who always lived a double life?

Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?

The director turns the diary of his sexual adventures into a serial narrative in the style of “One Thousand and One Nights”. This polyamorously-minded queer musical applies the same playful approach to folk tales as it does to Egyptian pop music.

Moss Agate

A visit to a cosmetic-surgery clinic and the discovery of a lump in his testicle and an abscess in his mouth confront filmmaker Selim Mourad with transience and decay in this unashamedly navel-gazing film essay. ‘Selim from Beirut’ is the last in a long list of names of extinct species he recites during a loveless Grindr meet up.

Martyr

A young man's tragic death at Beirut's seaside causes his friends to grapple with loss and to partake in his community's rites and ceremonies, exposing the city's schisms and its society's fault lines

Take 18

A night shoot. The Crew is exhausted. The Producer is enraged. The Director is lost. The Star is killed. The Gun is real. Everyone is a suspect.

A Very Dangerous Man

Beirut, summer, 2012: Life here seems as normal as this city can provide. Something is bubbling underneath, though. As people go about their normal lives, a young man gets chased around the streets of the eclectic Hamra district. Meanwhile, a suspicious-looking bag easily changes hands, and heads to an unknown destination around a busy cafe.