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Join us on April 26th at Cinema Lumière for the Belgian Film Premiere of Mohamad Abdouni’s 2025 film Treat Me Like Your Mother.

Program
// 19:30:  Introduction
// 20:00 - 21:30: Belgian film premiere Treat Me Like Your Mothe
// 21:30 - 23:00: Drinks & Bites in the FOMU foyer by Pixel Café

Ticket: 12€ - Click on here to purchase your ticket!

More About The Film

Set against the backdrop of what is arguably the first photographic archive of the Transfeminine experience in Lebanon, four remarkable women recount the unimaginable intimate events of their lives in post-war Beirut, unveiling a hidden world within the city that is only known to few.

‘Treat Me Like Your Mother’ uncovers intimate Transfeminine experiences within post-war Beirut. The documentary draws from an archive collected by the filmmaker over the last five years, in what is arguably the first photographic archive of Trans* women in Lebanon.

Amidst diminishing tolerance for otherness and escalated governmental oppression of queer communities around the world, and increasingly more so in Lebanon, the film resurrects the untold stories of four remarkable women, revealing fragments of a history that has since been lost, exploring four decades of the Trans* community’s social integration within the city.

The women’s unfiltered narratives touch on losses spanning generations, and contrast with our overstimulated existence today. Their stories reflect experiences from a bygone era, recounting tales spanning from the pioneering Lebanese state-funded gender-affirming surgery of 1997 to the vanished safe spaces that held no record of their existence up until today.

The film also weaves in the filmmaker's exploration of gender as an adult, aided by the women's own journeys and their retelling of their personal histories. It steps away from contemporary discourse, defying labels and politicized bodies to explore new narratives of gender identity and survival.

Trans* encompasses transgender, transsexual, trans-feminine, trans-masculine, and trans-non-binary individuals.

Mohamad Abdouni

Director & Executive Producer

Artist, photographer, filmmaker and curator based between Beirut and Istanbul. He is also Editor in-Chief and Creative Director of COLD CUTS magazine, the photo journal exploring queer cultures in the SWANA region.

His work has been exhibited namely at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the FOAM Gallery in Amsterdam, Art Basel, L’Institut du Monde Arabe and the Institute of Islamic Culture in Paris, Patel Brown in Toronto, Photo Arles and the Lyon Biennale amongst many others.

Mohamad’s previous venture into documentary filmmaking has been selected and awarded at festivals such as Eyes Wide Open and the Leeds Queer Film Festival in the UK, IQMF in Amsterdam, The Brooklyn Museum and Woodbury LGBTQ Film Festival in the US, and Pink Apple Schwullesbisches Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in Switzerland to name a few.

Commercially, he has shot for and directed narrative fashion films and music videos with the likes of Nowness, The New York Times, Dazed, Gucci, Vogue US, Vogue Italia, Burberry, Puma, Slate, Fendi, Farfetch, GQ, King Kong, Another, Vice UK and L’officiel.

His personal endeavors tend to focus on the untold stories of Beirut and uncovering the rich yet eradicated queer histories of the Arab-speaking region through several documentaries and photo stories that have been featured in publications from A24, Telerama, Foam Magazine, Tetu, New Queer Photography, Kaleidoscope, i-D, Photoworks, The Guardian, Facebook and more.

As of late he has dedicated his time to working on what is arguably the first archive of trans* histories in an Arab country, a project entitled Treat Me Like Your Mother: Trans* Histories From Beirut’s Forgotten Past. The collection resides safely today at the Arab Image Foundation.