This programme brings together stories of remembrance and transformation, each film a meditation on survival and the legacies we leave behind. In Aliens in Beirut, longing and loss blur in the wake of the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion, where a return home becomes a reckoning with identity, love, and disaster. Degenere follows Misael, a 60-year-old gay man, as he fulfills his late friend’s dream of dancing on stage, defying traditions that seek to erase queerness. Whoever Deserves It, Will Be Immortal carries the memories of generations of Cuban gay men, from persecution to liberation, reclaiming a past that refuses to be forgotten. Prayer for Tending Death infiltrates the hyper-masculine world of cockfighting, using ritual and performance to heal collective wounds. Hold Me Close captures the quiet intensity of Black queer love, an intimate archive of tenderness and endurance. Each of these films is a prayer—whether whispered in mourning, danced in defiance, or held in the arms of a lover. Together, they imagine a future where memory, love, and resistance shape the world to come.
Aliens In Beirut
This work is an ongoing trans-oceanic artistic research project that deals with the transmutation of violence within the cock fighting phenomenon across different territories and cosmovisions. I’ve been deeply immersed in the process of creating rituals that would address the need of tending to our deaths. I tackle this through an anti-colonial lens and by creating collective ceremonies for gender and sexually diverse people. In the particular case of the “Prayer for tending death” I started visiting cockfights in Nicaragua after the 2018 uprising that left me with a lot of death taking root in my inner universe. I would take the dying roosters back to my house to honor their death as a way to face the fear for the souls of the people I lost, transitioning to the ancestral realm. So I would give their blood to the earth, plug their feathers, cleanse them with sacred tobacco and share a meal with my queer sisters. This became a way of transmuting the pain of the roosters and our own deaths in the community.
Lebanon, Canada, 2025
Arabic, English. Subtitles in English
