How do we remember the land when the land itself is disappearing?

From Lebanon’s mountain forests to its arid plains, Rooted Resistance brings together four powerful short films that bear witness to the deep ties between nature, memory, and survival across the Arab region. Centered around the intimate and political stories of trees, birds, women, and ancestral land, this collection invites us to reimagine biodiversity not as a distant science but as a lived, urgent resilience.

Curated from the 2024 REEF Festival, which focused on “Human and Biodiversity,” the programme highlights Arab filmmakers who use cinema to weave ecological awareness into personal, political, and cultural narratives.

In Memory Within a Tree, Wassim Tanios follows two men’s quiet pilgrimage to Lebanon’s endangered Juniper forests. Each step becomes an act of remembering; not just a tree, but a lineage of care, loss, and rootedness.

The Earth Weavers by Rima Kaddissi celebrates rural Lebanese women as they reclaim traditional knowledge and reconnect with the land. Through weaving, language, and resistance, they remind us that biodiversity is a cultural practice as much as an ecological one.

Raed Zeno’s poetic essay The Tree of Hell confronts the legacy of the invasive Ailanthus tree, planted during colonial times and now choking Lebanon’s native ecosystems. Layering archival footage with landscape, it draws haunting parallels between environmental collapse and the violence of occupation and war.

Finally, in Shift, Sherine Raffoul and Moussa Shabandar trace the transformation of a former bird hunter into a passionate conservationist. What emerges is a story of hope, self-reflection, and the power of small actions to reverse ecological harm.

These films form a cinematic ecosystem that urges us to protect, remember, and reimagine our relationship with our world.