Khalil Joreige

Key figure of contemporary Lebanese cinema, along with Joana Hadjithomas, with whom he has worked in partnership since the beginning of his career, Khalil Joreige studied (already with Hadjithomas) in France and in the USA. He (and Hadjithomas of course) both graduated from the University of Nanterre and, later, from New York (in Film Direction). Joreige and Hadjithomas worked between Paris and Beirut, making shorts first, then features from 1999 on. Their work is a favorite of the Festival circuit and has received several awards, notably the "Montgolfière d'Argent" for A Perfect Day (2005). Their theme is invariably modern Lebanon, from its reconstruction in their satiric first feature film Around the Pink House (1999) to the new destructions of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War as witnessed by Catherine Deneuve in I Want to See (2008).