Born in Beirut – Lebanon, Rania Stephan graduated in Cinema Studies from Latrobe University Melbourne- Australia and Paris VIII University- France. Her career in film has been long and diverse. She has worked as first assistant with renowned filmmakers, as well as camera person and editor with researchers in Social Sciences and Documentarists (Procession of The Captives, Waiting for Abu Zeid, Catherine or The Body of the Passion, Panoptic). She has directed short and medium length videos and creative documentaries. Anchored in the turbulent reality of her country, her documentaries give a personal perspective to political events. She intertwines raw images with a poetic edge, where chance encounters are captured with compassion and humor. The work on archival material has been an underlying enquiry in her artistic work. Her most recent work investigates forgotten images and sounds that haunt the present. By juxtaposing them with new ones, she explores a diversity of meanings, triggering renewed narratives and emotions. Her artistic work explores how still and moving images collide and collude, multiply and subtract. Approaching images like an editor – part detective, part cinephile, she traces absence and remembrance, that are originary to those images. Her first feature film: The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (Artist’s Prize: Sharjah Biennale 10, 2011) received international acclaim and won many prizes.

Updated October 2020