Perhaps I will find something in the fog of erasure (working title)
Documentary, 10, Ireland, Lebanon
A daughter’s confrontation with her mother becomes a recurring thread, where intimate conversation and hesitation expose the tensions between remembering, narrating, and surviving what has been violently pushed out of sight. The film speculates on modes of erasure: how landscapes, institutions, and family memory participate in covering over genocide, and how tourism might either repeat or interrupt that erasure.This project was selected as part of the Reuters archive challenge program and is currently in post-production.
Produced by FilmEU, Dun Laoghaire Institute Of Art Design + Technology
Editing: Cindy Chehab & Rodolfo D. Sandino
Sound Mix: Rodolfo D. Sandino
Supervision: Chris Nikkel & Brendan Culleton
Women who sing (2026)
Video essay, 7, Belgium.
Produced by FilmEU, LUCA School of Arts
Supervision: Sarah Vanagt
A breather on the pavement of strangers (2025)
A Breather on the Pavement of strangers is a documentary merging the intimate with the political, centered around stories of
people from the island of Cyprus questioning their belonging and identity.
The project was collaboratively produced with the community after a series of workshops conducted by Cindy Chehab as part of a 6 months Artist residency hosted by Sharq.Org.
The project was collaboratively produced with the community after a series of workshops conducted by Cindy Chehab as part of a 6 months Artist residency hosted by Sharq.Org.
A breather on the pavement of strangers
Artist Residency, Documentary
Larnaca, Cyprus
Premiere: Athens Ethnographic Film Festival 2025
Seated Roots is a creative documentary that establishes the relationship of the young generation with the city of beirut from an
anthropological level. The film was premiered at the Arab short film festival winning the jury Prize, and was screened at the Ecran du réel Festival, the European FF in Beirut and kask Cinéma festival in Belgium.
Seated Roots
العودة إلى الجذور المرئية
Documentary, 15, Beirut, Lebanon
Documentary, 15, Beirut, Lebanon
Festivals:
European film festival, Arab film festival, Kask cinema, Ecran du Reél, Indie Film Festival.
Awards:
Audiance award (Arab film festival, Beirut, Lebanon, 2022)
Mapping Absentia
Online program, available on This. is.short
Curated And Texts By Najrin Islam & Cindy ChehabHistory is palimpsestic—it is an aggregation of memories, lived realities, and residues over residues. Erasure implies palimpsests—the accumulation of impressions as one reality gives way to another. One does not exist without the other.
Still from Xabûr, by Nafis Fathollahzadeh
The films in this programme hint at the slow, tangible changes taking place across land, water, and air. How does one track the transformations that land undergoes over multiple human lifespans? Where does water store its memories? How long have statues been waiting to return to the familiar? Colonialism operates through extraction and erasure, and its contemporary machinations attempt to further erase the traces of its erasures.
This programme explores the materiality of disappearance by taking up the absent for inspection. We witness land being stripped of its histories, renamed, repurposed, occupied, and rendered invisible. The films also expose how erasure is not always violent or sudden; it can be slow, administrative, insidious, and ideological.
Looking at various geographical points on the Global Majority map, these works explore the palpable coordinates of memory as it emerges through analogue cameras, cloud points, drones, and microscopes. Responding to the tremors of seismic shifts across human, territorial, and planetary membranes, the films examine the longue durée workings of memory—of both land and its peoples—as it reaches out backward in order to look forward.
UNDR
Kamal Aljafari
Palestine / Germany, 2024, 18 min
This essay film employs a range of archival perspectives to look at Palestinian land and its peoples through history. As helicopter footage reveals an austere gaze on natural land and people engaged in their daily occupations, one is reminded of the unrelenting state of aerial surveillance that Palestinians continue to live under. As children play hide-and-seek, the footage records the erosion of the land caused by frequent detonations. The film is as much a sombre meditation as a witness to the irreversible changes brought on by imperial acts of control.
Khabur (Xabûr)
Nafis Fathollahzadeh
Germany / Iran, 2023, 30 min
The film follows the journey of artefacts, specifically the “Tell Halaf statues”, from Syria to Berlin museums through archival photographs, using text that constantly counters their colonial gaze. The filmmaker uses a magnifying glass—a tool of detective investigation—to foreground the people and objects in the original images in wide shot while critiquing the relationship between land and lens.
I Accidentally Stepped on a Flower (Aksidentalisht Shkela Një Lule)
Eneos Carka & Stivi Inami
Albania, 2024, 17 min
This film takes an abandoned stadium in Albania to imagine an alternate space-time axis inhabited by the perennial wildflowers that have now taken over the area. A socialist relic, the stadium—once Tirana’s second-biggest—is suspended away from the evolutionary strides of its surrounding world. Rendered from numerous point clouds generated from a scan of the stadium, the film invites sensory immersion as it swims through the deserted site.
where we used to swim
Daniel Asadi Faezi
Germany, 2019, 8 min
This poetic essay film turns to Iran’s shrinking Lake Urmia as a place where memory and slow erasure meet. Between archival traces of a vibrant, living lake and present-day images of a cracked salt desert, we are left with the lake’s gradual disappearance.
Armat (Արմատ)
Anna Mkrtumyan
Armenia / Portugal / Belgium / Hungary, 2024, 13 min
This film follows a director in the wake of a personal tragedy. Grief pushes her towards science as a final attempt to make sense of what has happened. Through this investigation, the film links emotional loss to forms of geological and historical erasure, drawing a parallel between what disappears from personal memory and what is silently wiped from the landscape. Attentive to seismic shifts—both literal and metaphorical—the film explores how ruptures in the earth echo ruptures in lived experiences and land disappearance.
Still from Xabûr, by Nafis Fathollahzadeh
The films in this programme hint at the slow, tangible changes taking place across land, water, and air. How does one track the transformations that land undergoes over multiple human lifespans? Where does water store its memories? How long have statues been waiting to return to the familiar? Colonialism operates through extraction and erasure, and its contemporary machinations attempt to further erase the traces of its erasures.
This programme explores the materiality of disappearance by taking up the absent for inspection. We witness land being stripped of its histories, renamed, repurposed, occupied, and rendered invisible. The films also expose how erasure is not always violent or sudden; it can be slow, administrative, insidious, and ideological.
Looking at various geographical points on the Global Majority map, these works explore the palpable coordinates of memory as it emerges through analogue cameras, cloud points, drones, and microscopes. Responding to the tremors of seismic shifts across human, territorial, and planetary membranes, the films examine the longue durée workings of memory—of both land and its peoples—as it reaches out backward in order to look forward.
UNDR
Kamal Aljafari
Palestine / Germany, 2024, 18 min
This essay film employs a range of archival perspectives to look at Palestinian land and its peoples through history. As helicopter footage reveals an austere gaze on natural land and people engaged in their daily occupations, one is reminded of the unrelenting state of aerial surveillance that Palestinians continue to live under. As children play hide-and-seek, the footage records the erosion of the land caused by frequent detonations. The film is as much a sombre meditation as a witness to the irreversible changes brought on by imperial acts of control.
Khabur (Xabûr)
Nafis Fathollahzadeh
Germany / Iran, 2023, 30 min
The film follows the journey of artefacts, specifically the “Tell Halaf statues”, from Syria to Berlin museums through archival photographs, using text that constantly counters their colonial gaze. The filmmaker uses a magnifying glass—a tool of detective investigation—to foreground the people and objects in the original images in wide shot while critiquing the relationship between land and lens.
I Accidentally Stepped on a Flower (Aksidentalisht Shkela Një Lule)
Eneos Carka & Stivi Inami
Albania, 2024, 17 min
This film takes an abandoned stadium in Albania to imagine an alternate space-time axis inhabited by the perennial wildflowers that have now taken over the area. A socialist relic, the stadium—once Tirana’s second-biggest—is suspended away from the evolutionary strides of its surrounding world. Rendered from numerous point clouds generated from a scan of the stadium, the film invites sensory immersion as it swims through the deserted site.
where we used to swim
Daniel Asadi Faezi
Germany, 2019, 8 min
This poetic essay film turns to Iran’s shrinking Lake Urmia as a place where memory and slow erasure meet. Between archival traces of a vibrant, living lake and present-day images of a cracked salt desert, we are left with the lake’s gradual disappearance.
Armat (Արմատ)
Anna Mkrtumyan
Armenia / Portugal / Belgium / Hungary, 2024, 13 min
This film follows a director in the wake of a personal tragedy. Grief pushes her towards science as a final attempt to make sense of what has happened. Through this investigation, the film links emotional loss to forms of geological and historical erasure, drawing a parallel between what disappears from personal memory and what is silently wiped from the landscape. Attentive to seismic shifts—both literal and metaphorical—the film explores how ruptures in the earth echo ruptures in lived experiences and land disappearance.
Touring Programme
The Mediterranean is wilder than we think, it’s geological, it’s planetary.’
-Etel Adnan
The Sea as a Witness: An Archaeological Memory is a curated film programme by Cindy Chehab that explores the sea as a site of memory, displacement, ecological crisis, and violent histories. Drawing from cinema across the Mediterranean, the programme positions the sea as both archive and witness, where sound, image, and motion carry stories that resist erasure.
In a moment marked by aggression and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli Government in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran, this programme responds with urgency and political clarity. Across these regions, the sea has been militarized, to waters that have borne the weight of forced migration, fatalities, and ecological harm. The violence enacted upon bodies, human and nonhuman, along these shores and across maritime borders underscores a form of slow, systemic erasure that cinema can confront, contest, and document. The films gathered here insist that the sea must be understood as witness and as an active site of political meaning, where histories of violence are confronted.
The programme’s presentation in Dublin, a coastal city in Ireland, adds an urgent layer of reflection. Surrounded by the sea, Dublin’s geographical and historical positionality evokes questions of mobility, borders, exile, and the environmental and political forces that shape islands and coasts.
We come together to think collectively about the ties between the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, and reflect about our own closeness to the sea, our position, as witness and participant. We invite the audience to imagine how memory, care, and solidarity can flow across waters and oceanic borders.
A4SOUND GALLERY | Dublin, Ireland
28/03/2026
Endrosia | Nicosia, Cyprus
14-16/02/2026
Program :
Day 1:
About the sea (9’ Palestine, 2007)
Terrace of the sea (93’, Palestine, Lebanon, 2009)
Day 2:
This haunting memory that is not my own (30’, Lebanon, Armenia, 2021)
Summer 91 (20’, Lebanon, 2014)
Day 3:
Don’t get too comfortable (9’, Yemen, 2021)
Evaporating borders (73’, Cyprus, 2014)
Nicosia Cineclub (2022-2024)
Cinema collective in Nicosia, Cyprus, Curated by Cindy Chehab and Nuné Tunjikian.
2022 - 2024, Cyprus
Cinema collective in Nicosia, Cyprus, Curated by Cindy Chehab and Nuné Tunjikian.
2022 - 2024, Cyprus
Film, memory, and Trauma
EL TAELLER MULTI-SPACE | NICOSIA, CYPRUS
09/04/2024
The challenge of forgetting has intensified due to the captivating and paradoxically joyful act of capturing the human experience on film. Pictures, narratives, and impressions all co-construct memory. We wanted to explore through this program how filmmakers navigate this subject, examining our connections and knowledge as we witness these portrayals on screen, through evoking our memories and prompt contemplation on how cinema shapes our recollections, the depiction of trauma in films, the narratives surrounding memories, and their impact on our understanding of it.
This program was presented within the framework of INDAFF | Film, memory, and Trauma closing event.
Program (60’)
And I Wish You a Happy Life (2020)
A Full Life, I suppose (2023)
In the presence of filmmaker Alexandros Pissourios.
On decolonial narratives around public transport
Exhibition| Parallel screenings
Nicosia, Cyprus, 2024Public transport is more than just a means of getting from one place to another; it is an essential part of a city's identity, shaping its form and influencing the daily lives of its residents. The removal or disruption of public transport systems can strip a city of its character, echoing the dislocation experienced by migrants who leave their home countries and must adapt to new environments. As migrants navigate new destinations, often in former colonial powers, they encounter different modes of transport that further distance them from their cultural roots.
Through curated film screenings, this project explores the decolonial narratives embedded in public transport systems in Cyprus and Lebanon, shedding light on the complex histories of both islands and countries. The first screening featured colonial British films, followed by a discussion led by historian Ilaeira Agrotou Georgiou. This was followed by the workshop Tactical Bus Stops / Ad-Hoc Bus Stops in Nicosia conducted by Georges Kyrou, in collaboration with Pame Kaimakli.
In Cyprus, bus stops are often without shade or rain cover, typically consisting only of a signpost placed on the pavement. The project tasked participants with building a bus shelter using ad-hoc techniques, upcycling discarded or unwanted materials to create a pleasant space for waiting. The goal was to create a sense of monumentality around the bus stop, fostering a community connection to the structure and a sense of pride in its uniqueness through a tactile workshop.
The project culminated in January 2025 with Raneen Shamas's exhibition "Lost in Transit," which was held at El Taeller space in Nicosia.
In Lebanon, the mobility landscape is adorned with a vibrant mixture of words. From the backs of buses to the sides of trucks, these vehicles are not only carriers of passengers but also moving canvases, bearing witness to a nation's social, emotional, and cultural flows. Lost in Transit, a photo exhibition by Beirut-based artist Raneen Shamas, explores this vernacular, unraveling the hidden narratives within the everyday movement of people and goods.
Shamas gathers and recontextualizes the poetic, humorous, and often raw inscriptions found on these vehicles. These phrases, slang expressions, declarations of love, sharp political commentary, or heartfelt prayers: become windows into the collective memory of a society navigating its complexities. The language is raw, sometimes personal, yet universally resonant, reflecting ideas of identity, resilience, and adaptation in a world in constant motion.
The exhibition featured a parallel screening of Hady Zakkak's Marcedes (2011), a feature documentary exploring the life of a car as a witness to Lebanon’s political history from the French colonial era through the civil war. Followed by Fatima Joumaa's Our Beautiful Eyes (2022), a poetic personal reflection on encounters with mobility and identity in Paris.
On Revolution and Institutions
SOCIAL SPACE KAYMAKKIN | NICOSIA, CYPRUSBi-weekly film screening, October - December 2024
Our bi-weekly film program investigates the dynamic tension between systems of power and the forces that challenge them. Highlighting films from diverse eras and regions, the program delves into the complexities of revolutions—political and social—and the institutions that resist, adapt, or collapse under their pressure. The selection captures the spirit of rebellion and the transformative power of collective action, inviting audiences to reflect on cycles of oppression and the shifting relationship between individuals and institutions.
Program:
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomás Gutierrez Alea
Born in Flames (1983) by Lizzie Borden
The hour of liberation has arrived (1974) by Heiny Srour
A grin without a cat (1977) by Chris Maker
The Valley of Salt (2016) by Christophe M. Saber
Dust Games (2000) by Martin Marecek
Film festival 2nd edition | Programmer | Indie Film Festival | April 2024, Cyprus
As a co-programer for INDAFF, we programmed a series focused on shorts from SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa), divided into three distinct days, each exploring different facets of cinema. The program featured:
26/04/24
Cinema as a Cycle of Life: Shorts that reflect the ongoing rhythms and transitions of human existence.
27/04/24
Cinema as a Love Language: A selection of films that explore love, relationships, and emotional connection.
28/04/24
Decolonial and Indigenous Cinema: A day dedicated to shorts that challenge colonial narratives and highlight Indigenous perspectives.
Each day of the program showcased diverse voices from the SWANA region, offering audiences a chance to reflect on key cultural, political, and emotional themes through the lens of global cinema
Bodies Against the Grain
CASA DA COMUM | Lisbon, Portugal29/05/2025
A curated evening of five short films exploring the experiences, desires, and quiet resistance held within women’s bodies that took place in the heart of the city of Lisbon. These works include animated, experimental, and essay films. What unites them is a refusal to depict violence as spectacle.
The program emerged from ongoing curatorial discussions on how to present these films with sensitivity. We questioned not only what is shown but also how it is shown and who is speaking. This program invites viewers to not just sit with discomfort but to open space for reflection, accountability, and shared vulnerability.
Some of these films are not easy to watch, but watching them together might make them easier to hold. In a community, we build a different kind of gaze. One that listens, one that stays. To stand with is to honour. It is to say: I see you, I am here.
A surprise performance by Sepideh Khodarahmi followed the screening
The erotic clown invites you, your gaze, and your shivers…
Dive into the erotic potential of destruction; to stroke, pulse, touch, and taste; an invitation to enjoy the landscape of pelvic articulation and to witness a narrative written in goo and crumbles.
Curated by Sabrina Rose, with Cindy Chehab, Faranak Nateghi, Enxhi Noni, Ruba Alsharki
Program:
Sandstorm/ Mulaqat (2021) Seemab Gul| Pakistan | 20”
Will you come with me (2023) Derya Durmaz | Germany | 2”
To be a seed/ Ser Semilla (2023) Julia Granillo Tostado I Belgium, Mexico | 6”
Suburbs Of Eden (1996) Cecelia Condit I United States | 16”
Removed (1999) Naomi Uman | United States | 7”
"Where Do We Go with All This Love" is a visual installation featured in an exhibition in Budaörs, Hungary, as part of a
one-week contemporary animation collage residency.
Animation comtemporary Horizons
Budarös, Hungary
October 2023
Link: https://primanimafestival.hu/en/egyeb-programok/reszletes-program/63?fbclid=PAAaY-gdzEdvkAqw5RKuk3KQB_8nTervt2MV4uEnDdMP4jVUCMEYhngSjFd5s_aem_AeHYUUfY_e2i8M-TAJscF0VIdoE4Jt17VMqzbjraKk47Qkriywr2HnjlPAov2MuyZSU
Budarös, Hungary
October 2023
Link: https://primanimafestival.hu/en/egyeb-programok/reszletes-program/63?fbclid=PAAaY-gdzEdvkAqw5RKuk3KQB_8nTervt2MV4uEnDdMP4jVUCMEYhngSjFd5s_aem_AeHYUUfY_e2i8M-TAJscF0VIdoE4Jt17VMqzbjraKk47Qkriywr2HnjlPAov2MuyZSU
On the fringes of a burning memory (2023)
On the fringes of a burning memory is a hauntological audiovisual exploration into memory, space, and time, in relation to excessive consumption habits of the modern image in a saturated social media sphere.
This project was developed as part of the 2022 edition of the Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, presented by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company. It is presented as part of Exit 11’s exhibition, Peripheries.
On the fringes of a burning memory
على هامش ذاكرة مشتعلة
Artist Residency, Visual installation
Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2023
على هامش ذاكرة مشتعلة
Artist Residency, Visual installation
Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2023
Link: https://www.exit11arts.com/peripheries/
A Performance Installation
September 2022, Πρόγραμμα ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΟΣ ΥΠΠΑΝ
Concept/Text/Choreography Annie Khoury
Performing Panayiotis Tofi / Annie Khoury
Set Design Elena Kotasvili / Alexis Vayianos
Mentoring Fotis Nicolaou
Set Design Assistant Raf Tsiakli
Costumes/Sound Design Annie Khoury
Booklet Elena Kotasvili / Annie Khoury
Graphics/Communication Annie Khoury
Video Documentation Cindy Chehab
Set Construction George Christianopoulos
Ευχαριστούμε Παναγιώτη Μήνά για τις 'PYGOLAMBIDES' σου, που ακούστηκαν στην performance, ευχαριστούμε KISA Metalworks, Άντρια Ζένιου, Κωνσταντίνα Αντρέου και Home4Cooperation για την υποστήριξη.
Stunning Photography by Demetris Loutsios
The duo ichomagnetic thoughts (Antonia Kattou & Stelios Antoniou) unfold a platform titled ‘ichomagnetics’ that will engage in transdisciplinary interactions and happenings. Their first event 22° halo is co-curated with Nicola Mitropoulou.
Sound
ichomagnetic thoughts, George Bizios, Jörg Holland, mystiki fleva (Antonia Kattou), Stelios Antoniou
Visuals
Orestis Telemachou, Khaled Khalifa, Ioanna Economidou, Nicola Mitropoulou
Photos: Antonia Maria
Video documentation: Cindy Chehab
Nicosia, Cyprus, 2023
Don't Forget To Water The Plants
A Performance Installation
Nicosia, Cyprus, 2022