In this series, Farah Al-Hashem, a Kuwaiti Lebanese filmmaker and journalist, reflects on her entry into the Lebanese film industry and beyond. Through intimate, first-person testimony, she traces encounters with sexism, exclusion, and unspoken power structures while documenting how women continue to create, resist, and survive within an entrenched system.

I didn’t decide to make my first long feature Breakfast in Beirut in a meeting room, or during a grant application, or in front of a festival deadline.

I decided to make it on February 3, 2014. My birthday.

I had been working on the project for three years during my MFA studies between Los Angeles and New York at the New York Film Academy. I wrote the script many times. I rewrote it obsessively. Every version felt incomplete, too clean, too controlled for a city like Beirut. When I finally landed in Lebanon, I didn’t shoot a single scene from the script. Instead, I shot an entirely different film, unscripted, instinctive, and born on the very day I arrived.

February 3 felt like a signal. I take signs seriously. Always have.

Why return to Lebanon on my birthday?

Why not any other day?

At the time, I told myself it was coincidence. Later, I understood it as a kind of rebirth, or a mission. As if destiny were rewarding me with something larger than life: the chance to live in Beirut. There’s a saying people love to repeat: “Be careful what you wish for.”

I never truly understood it until I moved there.

Like any emerging filmmaker, I began by sending messages carefully written, professional, respectful to Lebanese and Arab film professionals: journalists, camera operators, producers, editors. I believed, naively, that having earned a respectable degree in a city like New York meant I would be met with the same respect and professionalism.

I was wrong.

Entrance into Beirut’s cultural circles did not happen through emails or well-written pitches. Some people replied. Many ignored me. Others never even opened the messages, whether on Facebook or by email. Very quickly, I realized I was being seen through two dominant lenses.

The first, overwhelmingly popular among middle-aged men framed me as an “open-minded” Arab woman.

Translation: easily seduced by a cup of coffee.

The second saw me as a rich Kuwaiti Lebanese bourgeoise woman who studied in the United States and therefore must be carrying a petrol station in her backyard, someone you could “work with,” financially.

My early conversations in Beirut often began with sentences like:

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t see you that way.”

“Can I leave now? It’s almost 10 p.m., and I need to sleep.”

Sometimes these encounters involved cigarettes puffed into my face in shady pubs in the middle of the day, accompanied by the same recycled Beirut music of the 1990s, as if time itself had stalled.

I remember three encounters vividly: one with a journalist, one with a producer, and one with an editor.

No, I take that back. The first editor I met did not speak to me at all.

I was sitting in a café in Hamra Coffee Beans, if I remember correctly, now replaced by a clothing store. He approached silently, nodded, and sat across from me. Assuming this was how things worked; I immediately began pitching my film.

I told him I had already filmed around Beirut. That the project was spontaneous, alive. That the editing needed to reflect this energy and that it was not a commercial film, but something closer to a home video or a personal essay.

I explained that I had filmed scenes with friends not cast objectively, but people I had grown close to since arriving in Beirut in 2014. Actors and actresses like Badih Abou Chakra, Zeina Makki, and Natasha Choufani, Natasha, a friend from university.

After listening for a few minutes, the editor looked at me strangely. He picked up his laptop bag and left.

In the middle of the conversation.

I sat there wondering whether he hated me that much, or whether I had unknowingly crossed a forbidden line in Beirut’s cinema scene.

Spontaneity, I would later learn, was a “faux pas.”

I remember another moment, earlier, sharper in its innocence. I was releasing my first short film, 7 Hours. I was twenty-four. The film itself was a souvenir salvaged from a failed relationship that had almost turned into a marriage.

I could have done what people expect women to do after heartbreak: eat a bucket of ice cream, disappear into bed, watch reruns of Friends until the pain softened into numbness. Instead, I did something else.

I turned the camera back on myself.

I filmed a confession. I spoke about fear. About loss. About the terrifying intimacy of loving someone and losing yourself in the process. I apologized to myself on camera, for staying too long, for being loyal to something that was already eroding me.

I didn’t know then that this reflex, this instinct to document instead of collapse would quietly turn me into a filmmaker. I didn’t know that 7 Hours would travel to Paris, win Best Film, or later be showcased in Cannes between 2012 and 2013.

During the release, a film critic interviewed me. He looked at how young I was. He kept calling me “darling” and “sweetheart.” I answered carefully, formally “sir,” sometimes even “uncle.”

Then, midway through the interview, he smiled and said, “Let’s put this aside. Let’s talk about your eyes, shall we?”

At that moment, I understood something early: even when your work is born from pain, even when it travels far, the industry will still try to reduce you to a surface.

And still, the film survives.

To be continued.