In the shadow of violence, grave and unpredictable, the Beirut International Film Festival (BIFF) launched last week. But it was forced to truncate its program and welcome fewer guests than anticipated as directors pulled out, citing security concerns. Nevertheless, Colette Naufal, the festival’s founder and longstanding director, managed to clandestinely screen a controversial film by famed-Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, in which he visits Israel; and launch a new segment devoted to activist movies. She talked with Al-Monitor about how the region’s film industry has changed over the last 15 years, including the effect of the Arab Spring on movie-making. Hint: after a year of virtual silence, she expects to see films coming out of Syria by next year. Read the full interview.

Al-Monitor: What are some of the changes in the Arab film industry you’ve seen since co-founding the Beirut Film Festival?

Naufal : When we started in ‘97, we focused on Lebanese cinema and that was it. We were seven years out of the war and Lebanon had not been reconstructed yet… By the third year I realized that there wasn’t enough production in Lebanon to hold a competition just for Lebanese films so we decided to go Pan Arab. 

Now, 12 years since we went Pan Arab, you have at least two feature films coming out of Lebanon every year. You have feature films coming out of Jordan, out of Iraq, out of Kurdistan Iraq — big production — the Gulf countries, all of them. You could say this region here equals the North African production, as far as art house films are concerned… The Gulf countries now have more production than Lebanon, in many cases, because in Lebanon there is no government funding, whereas Kurdistan Iraq, since the downfall of Saddam, has put a lot of money into film production.