Cinema of Lebanon

Cinema of Lebanon
City Mall Beirut
No. of screens	154 (2019)[1]
• Per capita	4.7 per 100,000 (2009)[2]
Main distributors	Haddad & Co Italia Film Fathalla[3]
Produced feature films (2015)[4]
Total	31
Fictional	17 (56%)
Animated	1 (1%)
Documentary	14 (42%)
Number of admissions (2010)[5]
Total	2,794,708
National films	16,666 (0.49%)
Gross box office (2006)[6]
Total	£L48.4 million
National films	£L2 million (4.1%)

The cinema of Lebanon, according to film critic and historian Roy Armes, is the only other cinema in the Arabic-speaking region, beside Egypt's, that could amount to a national cinema.^[7] Cinema in Lebanon has been in existence since the 1920s,^[8] and the country has produced more than 500 films.^[9]

While there has been steady increase in film production since the end of the Lebanese Civil War,^[10] the number of films produced each year remains relatively small in comparison to what it used to be in the 1960s, and the industry remains heavily dependent on foreign funding, mainly European.^[11] The industry also remains reliant on international box office revenues due to the limited size of the domestic market.^[12]

Despite that, local films have enjoyed a degree of local and international success. Ziad Doueiry's The Insult was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.^[12] Nadine Labaki's three features have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, starting with Caramel in the Directors' Fortnight.^[13] Her second feature Where Do We Go Now? was screened in Un Certain Regard and later won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival while her third feature, Capernaum, was nominated for a Palme D'Or and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.^[14]