Passionate promoter of Arab film-makers and founder of Beirut’s first art-house cinema
Though softly spoken and shy in front of the camera, Hania Mroue is as dynamic an advocate for Arab independent film-making as you could care to meet. Her love of cinema stems from its “new visions and new emotions”, while her success in promoting Arab film-making is the result of a steely determination and hard work. “It’s certainly not all about the glamour,” she says with a smile. “Promoting art-house cinema in this region can be very difficult.”
The founder of Metropolis, Beirut’s first art-house cinema, was born in 1975 in the southern Lebanese village of Harees. At 18, Mroue began her career in the arts dancing with Lebanon’s Caracalla dance group, a role she continued for 13 years, even as she studied economics, a subject she soon realised was not for her: “I didn’t want to work in a bank.”
After graduating, Mroue switched to cinema production and, in 1999, with two friends, founded Beirut DC, a cultural association for development and cinema. “We wanted to produce films that talk about us and our society,” she says, “the kind of films you don’t see on TV, on screen or at festivals because there are no art-house cinemas and no distributors promoting them.
Yet this cinema is important because it’s a mirror of our society and can question our system and our taboos.”
The three friends founded Beirut Cinema Days, the first Arab independent film festival in the region, of which Mroue is director. Beirut DC also established the website arabcinemadirectory.com, the first online database for Arab cinema, and Mroue is the spearhead of an initiative to screen independent Arab films in Europe.
But the project that best defines Mroue’s career so far is Metropolis, the art-house cinema – in the historical commercial district of Hamra – that took two years, and some big risks, to get off the ground. When it became a refuge for homeless families and their children, Mroue screened a range of thought-provoking films, from Roberto Rossellini classics to world cinema and Lebanese productions, to packed daily audiences of excited kids.
“It was the first time most of them had seen Lebanese films,” says Mroue. The lively debates afterwards inspired her to want to establish a film club with local schools, but the project is proving hard to get off the ground in the current, tense climate, with parents eager to whisk their children home straight after school.
“We live in turbulent times and, as an artist, you are forced to ask: ‘Is what I’m doing relevant?’,” says Mroue. “I feel the answer is yes. Maintaining cultural life in Lebanon is a responsibility.”
Hugh Macleod; portrait by Tanya Traboulsi |
