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March 2020

"Exit of Shirin and Farhad " by Babek Kazemi by Golan Haji, translated from the Arabic by Golan Haji & Stephen Watts  White olive flowers, poking from scorched trunks,  I smell them in the moonlight.  It’s mid-May. I hear the tender slap of your hand against its lower branches,  that glimmer in the orchard night, their silver leaves rippledby the breeze across their sheen of dust,  An owl flutters up–your son nurtured it like a tiny grouse in a guest-room,  it lives camouflaged like you, the door of its cage open, its eyes yellow  as narcissus eyes,  it will fly off tomorrow, in the dead of day, to

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Poetry, Translations
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Photographs from Beirut's abandoned cinema during the first week of the October 17 protests. On the second night of the October 17 protests, hundreds of protesters were violently tear gassed outside the Grand Serail. We got stuck in a stampede as it rained fire, and by the time we got out, we were scattered across Downtown. Somehow, my friend group managed to regroup at the Egg and climb into the dark and quiet cocoon. We sat on the ledge of the balcony, breathless and tearful, watching our city burn below us. It felt as though we’d been waiting for this for

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Photo Essay
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I have only lived in Lebanon for a little more than two months and have spent the vast majority of that time in Beirut. Yet, when I saw Yara, whose eponymous protagonist has spent her whole life in the same isolated village in the mountains, I was struck by a feeling of familiarity. Abbas Fahdel, the writer and director, makes many explicit cultural and historical references in the film, but what touched me more deeply was something of a spiritual truth conveyed intuitively through its visual language, that gave voice to what I see (and this may be an outsider’s

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Film Review
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Conversing with Lujain Jo: On documenting Lebanon’s revolution, filming jellyfish, and Bedouins On a January afternoon, I found Lujain Jo seated outside her balcony, underneath a sprawling rubber tree. She was smoking a cigarette and looked as enchanting as always, in oversized black sunglasses and a Palestinian-patterned thobe cinched at the waist with a clunky, silver Bedouin belt.  Photo By Lujain Jo I’ve known her for over two years now, having met through our work at Megaphone News, where she is a videographer. Lujain is an Iraqi filmmaker, content producer, and activist based in Beirut. Over the past ten years, she has

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Interview
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