لينا العبد
Biography
Lina Al Abed is a Palestinian director born in Damascus in 1980. She studied Journalism at the University of Damascus and completed her final project on Syrian author Mohamed al Maghout, which was broadcast by Al Jazeera in 2007.
Her first short film, Noor Alhuda was produced by the station Al Arabiya and received an award at Doc Box for the best Syrian documentary film of 2010. She later produced and directed her first feature film, Damascus, My First Kiss (2013),followed by the short filmDream of PowerfulMonster, which received the award for the best short documentary film at the Beirut Shorts International Film Festival in 2014.
Her latest documentary, Ibrahim: A Fate to Define, is a personal film in which the director tells us the story of the life and death of her father, Ibrahim, a member of the revolutionary organisation Abu Nidal, who was killed in the 1980s. In an interview, Lina Al Abed explains the film’s origin and point of departure:“For the first time in my life, I received permission to travel to Palestine. My mother is Egyptian and I grew up in Damascus with a Jordanian passport”, she explains. “I went to visit my father’s relatives in their village, Deir Abu Mashal, near Ramallah. Those nine days were enough to relieve me of the feeling of being a refugee that I have had all my life. I began to ask myself questions about my identity. That was when I knew I was ready to make this very personal film“.
Lina Al-Abed has lived and worked in Beirut since 2012, following surge of the revolution in Syria.