Six years is not what we planned.

AFLAMUNA.online was supposed to run for a few months. In April 2020, cinemas closed everywhere, festivals were cancelled one after another, and films were cut off from the people they were made for.

For Arab independent cinema, which never had many screens to begin with, what disappeared was what little remained. So we built something fast, from a single sentence: make these films available, free, anywhere, for as long as we needed to.
You had other ideas. You came, you stayed, you wrote to us, you shared, you pushed back on our choices and asked for the next film.

What was supposed to be a stopgap became 418 films, not counting the ones we brought back. 246 features, 172 shorts. More than half documentaries, which tells you something true about where Arab independent cinema stands today. Tens of thousands of viewers, across the region and well beyond it.
In that catalogue: Farouk Beloufa’s Nahla, unmissable, catching revolutionary Beirut on the eve of its collapse. Janin…Jenin, Mohammad Bakri’s last documentary, a scream on film, as necessary as it is hard to sit through. Muhammed Hamdy’s Perfumed with Mint, a psychological thriller that edges into the fantastic, where repression becomes a haunting and the body a battlefield. The Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli’s first feature, a film that rewards every return. Jocelyne Saab filming her city at war from inside it, in Letter from Beirut. Full retrospectives: Ghassan Salhab, Mohamed Soueid, Borhane Alaouié, Omar Amiralay. And alongside them, first films, student films, the ones that had nowhere else to go.

AFLAMUNA.online was never a library. It was a monthly programme built with a guest curator, or with a cultural institution or a festival: Culture Resource, Metropolis, AFAC, REEF, Maskoon, Beirut Cinema Days, Palestine Cinema Days, AFLAM, ALFILM, SAFAR, Aswat. Essays written to sit alongside the films. Filmed conversations with the people who made them. Coup de Cœur, where Jumana Manna, Carole Abboud, Bassam Mortada and others came to make the case for one film that mattered to them. Three short film competitions, Dimmed Voices, Transformations, Well-being, with the awards decided by your votes. And when the Israeli regime began levelling Gaza, then Lebanon, A Necessary Act of Resistance.
The obsession, always, was access.

Then the platform renamed us. Beirut DC became AFLAMUNA. Our films. The name came from there, from those films, and from the people watching them.
We are bringing down the curtain on AFLAMUNA.online at the end of November.
So here are two months to look back over more than six years. Through October and November, the platform becomes a retrospective: the films that defined each programme, the ones that started arguments, and the ones you never stopped asking for. Everything stays free, the way it has been since day one. It all ends on 26 November.
Watch them. Better still, pass them on to someone who has never heard of them.
Closing something that still works is not something you do lightly. But our resources and our attention need to go to other projects that deserve them just as much.

The commitment itself does not change. Access to this cinema is not a favour handed down. It is a cultural right. We will keep defending it: in person, through Masahat AFLAMUNA and its network of community cinemas across the region, and online, in other forms, when the time comes.

To the team behind AFLAMUNA.online. You built it film after film, cycle after cycle. You programmed through explosions. Through economic collapse. Through power cuts and internet blackouts. Through bombardment. Through genocide. There were weeks when keeping a programming calendar could have seemed absurd. You kept it anyway. You never once treated this work as a luxury or a distraction. Renée, Riham, Stéphano, Lina. Thank you.

Filmmakers trusted us with their films, sometimes for free, with no guarantee of anything in return. It is their work, not the platform, that people came for. That bears saying out loud.
And you, who watched, who came back week after week, who wrote to tell us what you had seen.
Thank you.
A platform is closing. Nothing else is.