The Intuitive Film Lab
In support of audiovisual artists all over the world
LEBANON 2020
In 2020, Lebanon endured multiple crises:
- A massive explosion that devastated the city killing more than 200 people, injuring more than 6,000, and displacing 300,000.
- An economic collapse eroding people’s ability to access basic goods.
- The COVID19 global pandemic compounding poverty and economic hardship.
- Rising political instability, endangering people’s basic rights.
- The Lebanese political class failed to adequately address any of these crises, some of which were of their own making.
— Human Rights Watch
But with love we shall prevail.
— Home of Cine-Jam
The Venue
Born from our need to rise above the darkness and support the filmmaking community by inspiring them to transform their emotions into art.
Home of Cine-Jam established a small venue where we, Muriel Abourrouss and Denise Jabbour, offer creative consultancy sessions to filmmakers, a means to support our creative community in these challenging times.
We select projects by factor of authenticity and truthfulness.
What is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.
— Brian Eno
The Rooftop
Our rooftop will be the space where all filmlab programs or consultancy encounters will take place. It is a home for all filmmakers who dare to look in the mirror.
There is no must in art because art is free.
— Kandinsky 1866 – 1944
The Birth
Cine-Jam is the first intuitive film lab in Lebanon and the Middle East. In 2012/2013, it was conducted three times in Beirut and once at the FAMU film school in Prague. Four batches in total resulted in 27 short intense films, portraying genuine emotions with images and sounds that are unique and specific to each artist.
In 2021, after having kept the film-lab dormant for 9 years due to Lebanon's social, political, and economical situation and due to our dedication for Zyara which needed our full attention, came the Beirut August 4th blast and revived in us the necessity to relaunch the film-lab.
The Vision
Our mission is to encourage talented and passionate audiovisual artists, to give them space and tools to unveil their own original cinematic language.
In the film lab, authenticity and intuition are the compass by which we ground ourselves and co-create with life what can only be manifested through each and everyone of us: our unique audio-visual expressions of our personal emotions and depiction of life.
The Process
The Home of Cine-Jam Intuitive Film-Lab is a process that could guide you gently to face your mirror and allow you to channel from your gut, through your lens and into a screen, what could scare you the most, by using your most unique authentic creative self.
The Film-Lab is the safe ground for the hidden in us to come out and transform; which is mostly what we do not want to face, because of the emotional intensity it triggers in us. The fear of being vulnerable which paralyses us and what most artists call: Creative Blockage!
Screenings and Q&A of the Intuitive Filmlab series in the presence of the artists.
Declaration of Intent
Dreaming of a better world got me through the war, daydreaming got me through school with minimal damage, believing in my dreams got me through university penniless, visualizing my dreams got me to become a cinematographer when only men were allowed next to the camera.
The evolution of my dreams got me to create the intuitive film lab; and through it all, it was commitment, passion, discipline, and perseverance that carried me through.
I created this film lab in 2012 when it was still a raw filmmaking workshop that I called Cine-Jam. What pushed me to manifest it, was a question by a beautiful, talented artist and friend, "Tell us how your creative mind functions?”
Here it is… my answer is in this Intuitive Film Lab.
It is the whole of who I am, from heart to mind, from spirituality to physicality, from the seen and the unseen parts of me. This Intuitive Film Lab is my gift to the audiovisual artists of the world who are willing to look within and discover with me the genius that lies within them… in their gut through their intuition, they can reveal their uniqueness through a composition of sound and images that only they can create… and I, in all this, I celebrate the “creation” by witnessing their art and the divine that awakens every time they allow life to co-create with them, through their emotions and talent, their personal cinematic depiction of being human.
Muriel Aboulrouss
Teaching is for me an opportunity to look in my students eyes and empower the glow in their hearts. Teaching is an act of empowerment, an act of love but most of all it’s a revolution on the self through audiovisual arts.
Creative consultancy is a creative partnership we offer to the artists in their process to write, produce and finalize their films or series.
