The Metropolis Arthouse Cinema is tucked into a small screening room on the lower floor of what used to be a grand cinema complex called the Sarroulla, one of the many movie theatres that once lined Hamra Street in West Beirut. The Sarroulla closed its doors around the time Lebanon’s civil war came to an end in 1990.

Hania Mroué, who was born in 1975, the year that conflict began, remembers going to see films there. Now the Metropolis, which she founded, is one of two principal venues for the Ayam Beirut al-Cinemaiyya (Beirut Cinema Days) film festival, which she directs. The festival opened last Saturday and runs until Sunday. Given the violence between Israel and Hezbollah that erupted in the summer, it almost didn’t happen at all. Now it has become an emblem of Beirut’s cultural resilience.

The building that housed the Sarroulla has recently been revived as a cultural centre. Masrah al-Madina (Theatre of the City) moved in and put on acting and directing workshops alongside major theatrical productions. Music promoters and arts organisations rented the space for concerts and exhibitions.

Then Mroué, who has long been part of the local film collective Beirut DC, which has organised Ayam Beirut since 2001, decided to establish the city’s first proper arthouse cinema there. She opened the Metropolis on July 11. It turned out to be a rather inauspicious date. The war broke out the next day and Beirut found itself under bombardment and siege.

The Sarroulla opened its doors to 209 people who had been forced from their homes by bombing campaigns. Half of them were under the age of 16, so Mroué had to come up with ways to entertain a hundred youngsters. For 34 days she did just that, grabbing whatever animations or kiddie flicks she could find and throwing them on screen. But she always had an eye on the calendar. The fourth edition of Ayam Beirut had been in the works for six months.

“I kept telling myself that if the war ends a month before the date of the festival, we’ll do it,” says Mroué. “Even though it would be difficult, I knew it would be feasible if we had one month to prepare.” The UN-brokered ceasefire came into effect on August 14.

This is not to say that Ayam Beirut opened unchanged. The original line-up of 100 films — including features, documentaries, experimental shorts and animations from all over the Arab world — dwindled to 40. Mroué usually heads a crew of 30 to run the festival but is now operating with ten. Beirut DC is strict about screening only 35mm but in a few cases, such as Oday Rasheed’s Underexposure, the first feature film to come out of Iraq since the invasion in 2003, it’s had to make do with video.

However, the war did help Mroué to land Ayam Beirut’s opening slot — the world premiere of the Lebanese director Michel Kammoun’s Falafel. According to Mroué, Kammoun was hesitant about screening his first feature at Ayam Beirut because he did not want too much time to pass between its debut and its general release. “After the war we called him and immediately he said yes,” Mroué says. “It wasn’t a screening any more. It was a statement.”

“I felt helpless when the war broke out,” says Kammoun. “What can you do with that scale of destruction and sadness? I wanted something to give me hope. The festival does that. I felt it was important to show the film now.”

Local audiences seem to agree, pouring into the Metropolis and Cinema Six Sofil — the festival’s other venue in East Beirut — to see Falafel and other films such as Saeed Taji Farrouki’s documentary on Arab immigration to Europe called I See the Stars at Noon. There has also been the local premiere of the Lebanese auteur Ghassan Salhab’s The Last Man, fresh from its appearance at the Locarno film festival, and the American director James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, which won three awards at the Sundance Festival.

Mroué has also added a few events that take recent events into account. Videos under Siege gave artists who had made short films and videos during the war a chance critically to reassess their work. “I didn’t know if people wanted to get out of the war mentality,” Mroué says. ”But I needed to.”

For his part, Kammoun appreciates the festival for its role in marking the resumption of Beirut’s cultural life, but he’s sceptical about it heralding a new generation of Lebanese film-makers.

“There is a generation, meaning there are those of us who are working now, but not a generation in a cinematic sense. I mean is there a Lebanese cinema? This is just a theory, and you lose time thinking about it.

“The only infrastructure Lebanese cinema has at the moment is the talent and the crew. There’s nothing else. But the will to make films exists — and strongly so.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• DVD

• Oscars

• Bollywood

Editor's choice

• Guns N’Roses: Chinese Democracy
• The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009
• Quantum of Solace