26th Arab Film Festival

A Conversation with Ely Dagher & Manal Issa

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Filmmaker Ely Dagher and actress Manal Issa join AFMI Director of Film Programming Yasmina Tawil for a conversation about their film THE SEA AHEAD.


Watch the film online or on Friday November 18th at the Roxie Theater!


THE SEA AHEAD is about a young woman who makes her way back home to her parents’ house in the middle of the night leaving a bad experience behind. Haunting pressures to fit back into the family dynamics as well as revealing details of her life abroad weigh heavy on her. Feeling cornered, her anxieties resurface, leading her to find solace in another part of her Beirut life that she had forsaken. A life that is for her as familiar and foreign now as it ever was.


Born in 1985, Beirut-based Ely Dagher Graduated with an MA in contemporary Art Studies and New media from Goldsmiths College in London. Ely Dagher is an artist/ filmmaker working with different mediums and producing work that intertwines on different levels. His work focuses on the layering and constructing of multiple narratives across film, painting and installation. Drawing from his upbringing in Lebanon and his current situation, his work explores the correlation and possibilities created through the play between cultures, histories and fiction. Ely’s artworks function as an extension to his interrogations, joggling between different points of identification and visual structures, from surrealism, science fiction and the occult. His latest short film “WAVES‘98” (2015) was awarded the short film Palme D’Or at the 68th Cannes Film Festival. His films have been awarded at numerous international film festivals.