5 Young Arab Designers Who Refuse to Blend In

The emerging cohort of designers transforming raw material into a living temperament

Time Tells Tales: What Your Watch Says About You

What can a watch reveal beyond the time? A quiet expression of cultivated taste, unspoken ambition, and the subtle art of making a statement without saying a word

HinDidi: When Bollywood Invited Algeria to Dance 

In the aftermath of independence, Bollywood offered Algeria something revolution could not: the freedom to dream, to love, and to imagine a life beyond struggle. Decades later, one Indian film, Janitou, remains a tender relic of a future that never quite arrived

Notes on Lebanese Frenchies and the In Vitro Diaspora

Francophilia has long been a part of Lebanon’s complex sociopolitical fabric. The Frenchies of the country detach themselves from their environment and enjoy a bourgeois French-centric mode of existence. In the wake of ongoing national crises, members of the francophone middle class are becoming increasingly critical of their upbringing and aim to re-appropriate a certain sense of Lebaneseness

What It Takes to Be Mister Lebanon

As opportunities shrink in Lebanon, contestants are pouring increasing amounts of time, money and effort into the country’s most famous male beauty pageant, and the possibilities it might unlock

Salam, El Mehdi!

Pop star, filmmaker and now leading man, El Mehdi talks gatekeeping, going home and the peace that comes with choosing yourself

Ugliness Looks Back

From a 1960s Iranian leper colony to Kim Kardashian's surgeon, tracing how "ugly" became a diagnosis to be cured rather than a way of being seen

This Film Festival is Taking SWANA Cinema from Beirut to Rome for Its Second Edition

Half film festival, half fundraiser, Here & Elsewhere returns for its second year in Beirut and Rome with a programme built around memory