Correspondent Quests: 
Traces of PFLP cinema in Beirut

Beirut, 3 February 2024

My dear Anaïs,

Wrapping up years of work on three vast archival collections, including Baalbeck Studios, last month, my thoughts retraced the ghosts and (unsung) heroes, visionaries and revolutionaries that featured in it.¹ When I first “met” the Baalbeck Studios paper archive ², I was barely able to move! The shelves on the walls were filled with old Leitz and Elba folders, in the centre were large boxes piled up high.

I didn’t know precisely what Baalbeck Studios stood for nor what I’d find!

Initially, I organised the folders, paper files, notebooks, booklets and loose documents in the boxes. I created detailed inventories for a multitude of objects and connections with ghosts and protagonists, such as, musicians, filmmakers, producers, actors, commercial directors, suppliers – and most significantly a few of the 120 individuals I found to have worked anything between a few months and four decades at Baalbeck Studios – or their families.

Of the journalists and scholars who came over the years, asking for this or that, you were the only “repeat offender”, if I am not mistaken…

What did you expect when you first came to my office, filled with the memories of the who’s who of Arab filmmakers and musicians of the past sixty years, in 2020? What were you hoping to find?

Tripoli, 5 February 2024

Dear Anaïs,

Thank you for the picture of dapper, corduroy-clad Kassem! As you certainly know, he filmed considerable parts of his adaptation of Kanafani’s Return to Haifa here in Tripoli, assisted by a multitude of volunteers and extras who stepped in to recreate Haifa’s port during the Nakba. I’ve always wanted to ask him what it was like filming these scenes, with Tripolitan friends and comrades but also numerous Palestinians from Nahr el Bared (where he directed the eponymous film) and Beddawi camps, in 1982. They effectively re-enacted traumatic scenes – while waiting to return.

You refer to correspondence (between the PFLP and Baalbeck Studios) and invoke “voices of the absent ones” …

The Baalbeck Studios archive is a very chatty one! I felt the presence and had the sounds from the recording studio, the voices of so many divas, actors, singers, film professionals and the staff around me while working with the archive.

It took me five years, to find documents related to Palestinian and other revolutionary productions beyond the ones published in About Baalbeck Studios and Other Lebanese Sites of Memory.

After sorting through and analysing the documents, I found first traces in the Baalbeck Studios lab, the editing room, and under categories such as Film Customers General A to Z or Sundry Clients. Indeed, these included the rental of a camera to film Ghassan Kanafani’s funeral procession – a service for which Baalbeck Studios did not charge the PFLP: I remember the budget line was crossed out with a red pen. One document from the Film Section Laboratory for a 16mm black & white film, again relates to the release print of footage shot at Ghassan Kanafani’s funeral.     
What else was in there?

Baalbeck Studios was a company, which did business with an array of clients within Lebanon and beyond. The one hundred thousand or so of documents I have scrutinised concerned primarily technical and financial matters. Only rarely did personal – or political – positions transpire. A handwritten letter sent from the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI) in which a sender with an illegible signature refers to “Daoud Albina”, left me wondering about the paper trail and the (personal) relations between Baalbeck Studios staff and revolutionary filmmakers, editors or Palestinian cadres. Later on, Khadijeh Habashneh⁵ who witnessed the emergence of the PCI and was greatly involved in it, confirmed to me that Daoud (or David) Albina was their contact person at Baalbeck Studios.

I am indeed able to distinguish many staff handwritings, acronyms and signatures but have struggled with these letters sent from the PCI and PFLP. How nice of Bassam Abu Sharif, in his position as member of the PFLP politburo in charge of information, to have typed his name with a typewriter!

The acronym “AS”, for example, standing for Aïda Salloum, appeared in so many administrative documents from early 1966 onwards. I started to become truly obsessed with Aïda!

Director of photography Hassan Naamani simply said that when he went to Studio Baalbeck, he’d go straight to Aïda.

Aïda’s and financial controller Roger Anhoury’s acronyms, appear on the documents sent in 1976 by the PCI and PFLP to Baalbeck Studios. On one also appears “SK” for Stanley Khouri, the Palestinian sound engineer who built Baalbeck Studios’ superb sound studio.

And who was Aïda? She showed me some pictures of herself as a young woman dancing in Fairouz’ and Wadih and Marwan Jarrar’s troupe, when I first met her! She was a secretary, working from the office on the left, as one would get up the few steps leading into Baalbeck Studios. She was indispensable.


Badie Bulos was a naturalised Palestinian from Acre… From the documents I have read, he always struck me as exceedingly analytical and savvy – his company boasted state of the art equipment – but also generous and visionary. He intended on building a Hollywood-style studio in the hills above Beirut in Monteverde in 1966.

Whether he had any personal ties with any of the Palestinian revolutionary movements, I can’t tell. Nor did his late niece know.⁶

What is, however, crucial to note is that the Palestinian Film Unit (PFU) from its early days in Jordan in 1969, sent film material to Baalbeck Studios…⁷

Badie must have been supportive: without his approval, commercial feature films such as Reda Myassar’s Falistin al thaer (الفلسطيني الثائر), Kiffah hatta al tahrir (كفاح حتى التحرير) and Gary Garabedian’s Koullouna Fidayen (كلنا فدائيون), all released in 1969, and of course the dozens of revolutionary (mostly Palestinian) films and newsreels could never have made their way through the studios’ various departments!

I like to believe that he approved of the artistic and intellectual effort underway in the various Palestinian organisations, to make use of the medium of film, and to experiment with it, for revolutionary purposes. Whether he ever saw any of the films or corresponded with any of its filmmakers… I doubt it. Except maybe for Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes as Saheb Haddad, the editor you mentioned above who worked for 12 years at Baalbeck Studios, co-edited this high-profile Syrian production.

I will tell you more about what films went through Baalbeck Studios in 1974 – a very busy year for the lab and other departments. Unlike other years, many of the documents describing the various work processes in 1974 survived…

Beirut, 7 April 2024

Dear Anaïs,

Did you know that prior to working with the PCI, Fouad Zantout was assistant editor to two very popular movies Baalbeck Studios was involved in during the 60s? The Idol of the Crowds (فاتنة الجماهير, Muhammad Salman, 1965) and Mawal (موال, Muhammad Salman, 1966) both starring Sabah. Like other editors such as Nawal Costi, he was commissioned but not an employee.

A few Baalbeck Studios staff indeed assisted first the PFU and later worked at the PCI after 1976.

Previously, according to Kassem Hawal, “some Palestinian technicians work in [Baalbeck Studios]. They are professionals in showing and printing films, as well as in colour correction. I worked with them for free, and we started learning techniques that we did not know, including colour correction, where we used to correct colours with filters.” ¹⁰

A pioneer in colour correction in Lebanon was indeed David Albina, mentioned above, a naturalised Palestinian from Jerusalem, who worked in the lab of Baalbeck Studios for 13 years.

You referred to Zantout and probed whether the “meaning of his contribution to the PFLP artistic and political line, hope and struggles from the Baalbeck Studios archives” can be grasped.

Khadijeh Habashneh credits him for joining the PCI since the early 70s where he worked on the United Media newsreels. These were under the supervision of Kamal Nasser until his assassination in 1973 and then the PCI. A paper trail of some of these newsreels¹¹ are in UMAM’s Baalbeck Studios archives, together with one linked to Zantout’s documentary On the Path of the Palestinian Revolution (على طريق الثورة). Whereas the date on the documents in the Baalbeck Studios collection I recall is 1974, this does not necessarily reflect the date of production. As in the case of Hawal’s film Our small houses, these paper trails tell the production history:


Fig. 6 Four of 15 documents issued for the film Our small houses to the PFLP dated between 2 September and 24 October 1974. Courtesy of UMAM D&R, Collection “Baalbeck Studios”.

We’re able to establish the approximate duration of the production (bearing in mind there may be lacunae) and chronology. Additional indications including specifications such as 16mm black & white film, the meterage, developing negative picture, printing and processing, negative cutting and release print or answer print, or dupe or zero copy, to name a few.

There is a field for notes (miscellaneous) where the director of the lab, Khalil “Toto” Khoury or David (in his incredibly neat handwriting) may leave a comment and sign off at the bottom. The second person to sign such documents would be the clerks of the lab who’d also file these forms. In 1974 this would be Mustafa Kassem or Mitri Yazbek with his ornate “MY” or the secretary “MRaï” (Mona Raï).

In closing, I would like to acknowledge Hawal’s pioneering role and the visionary approach he had in maintaining the nexus between revolutionary word and cinema:

“Therefore, in addition to establishing the cinema department, I started heading the cultural section of Al-Hadaf magazine, so the written thought paved the way for the cinema industry.”¹²

The Palestinian revolution drew many people to Beirut in the 70s. Danish filmmaker Nils Vest shot his documentary An Oppressed People is Always Right in Lebanon in late 1974. He made use of Baalbeck Studios at least once, and visited the PFLP offices. Being Danish he knew Anni Kanafani ¹³ – and he also recalls indeed meeting Kassem.¹⁴

He also took “historical archive material from the PLO's film office” back to Copenhagen…¹⁵

You lament the “missing answers” and I can only concur.

Most Baalbeck Studios feature films were issued a certificate of origin. The shards that we’re piecing together like investigators on a crime scene and the memories of surviving protagonists we gather are the birth certificates of these films.

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Nathalie Rosa Bucher

Nathalie Rosa Bucher is a writer and researcher with an academic background and has published features for South African, Lebanese, and international media. Extensive research on the old cinemas of Tripoli undertaken since 2013 has led to her joining UMAM’s Documentation and Research team, as an archives assistant and researcher and curating TripoliScope. She obtained an MPhil in Rhetoric Studies and Disaster Risk Science from the University of Cape Town and is particularly interested in arts and culture, heritage and memory, mobility, indigenous knowledge systems and livelihoods adaptations strategies.

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