منذ 4 أشهر
Organized within the framework of Metropolis’ Cinematheque Beirut (Lebanon) project, The Second Encounter is a film festival dedicated to film archives and archival practices. It took place over nine days, from 6 to 14 February 2026.
To encounter archives today is to reflect on what it means to preserve, restore, restitute, and disseminate film and film-related materials in times and territories continuously unsettled by war and destruction.
Read more about The Second Encounter and explore the program of The Multiple Lives of Images.
Entitled After Absence, this second edition focused on works that propose different ways of engaging with loss, approaching archives beyond their function of documentation and resisting absence, in order to activate them as sites of political and social imagination.
The festival brings together seminal and newly restored films, alongside works that re-use archival material. Through screenings, performances, and talks, and an exhibition, the program foregrounds recent restoration efforts in the Arabic-speaking region and opens a space for exchange around current archival practices.
© Cinémathèque Beirut
In parallel to the festival, a closed symposium on archival practices, The Multiple Lives of Images, brought together practitioners working in and around film archives in the Arabic-speaking region over three days. In partnership with the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA), a two-day workshop with archivist Chantal Partamian was organized for university students as part of Cinematheque Beirut’s work in preserving Georges Nasser’s archives.
After the first edition in January 2023, which initiated a collective reflection on various practices of image preservation and restoration in the Arabic-speaking region, we gather again to reflect on archival practices in times and in territories that are constantly being unsettled by wars and destruction.
This edition will take the archival absence that results from violent contexts as a starting point and will ask: How can we approach archives through our presence before them today, rather than through their absence from our collective memory? How can we build on the accumulation of work and skill building that has been done over the years all the while taking into account the context of continuous loss we operate in? – Nour Ouayda, Festival and symposium artistic director
The Multiple Lives of Images created space for dialogue and exchange between film practitioners. The two first days were dedicated to 6 panel discussions. There were explored the challenges of preservation, conservation and accessibility of the archives, from both a group and an individual perspective. The last day and session was designed as a collective reflection moment, to unpack the discussions of the previous days and articulate key reflections and questions moving forward.
During the Symposium, Nada Bakr, Executive Director of NAAS, moderated the talk on An Accumulation of Archival Practices between Tamer el Said and Ayman Nahle.
The festival and symposium was organized in partnership between Metropolis (Lebanon) and Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS, Germany) and with the support of the Drosos Foundation (Switzerland).
Read more about The Second Encounter and explore the program of The Multiple Lives of Images.
