The Trail of Dracula

A vampire relates his epic life story of love, betrayal, loneliness, and dark hunger to an over-curious reporter.

Boujad: A Nest In the Heat is a personal and anguishing look at issues of separation, independence and return. As director Hakim Belabbes chronicles his journey from his home in Chicago to visit his family in his hometown of Boujad in Morocco, his exploration of family relationships is self-conscious and at times painfully honest. We witness his most private moments with his family. Belabbes' film intimately explores the domestic spaces and religious rituals of intra-family relationships, especially when compounded by one member's break with traditional values.

Tango of Yearning (1998) is the first episode of an autobiographical trilogy on postwar Lebanon, later including Nightfall (2000) and Civil War (2002). Taking its title from Tango of Hope, a classic ballad by Nur al-Huda, the film draws from the director’s reflections on war, love, and cinema, as well as his personal experience at the public television channel TéléLiban. Conjuring various snippets of audiovisual archival material, the film is a poetic elegy to film, Beirut’s movie theaters, and a city undergoing radical transformation. Mohamed Soueid has long been a proponent of the experimental video documentary movement in Lebanon, playing a significant role in the country’s creative renaissance since the end of the civil war. Originally trained as a news videographer during the war, the experience offered him a facility with the medium, which he further developed by making non-linear documentary films with a distinctly personal take.

After “Letter From a Time of Exile”, the director is back in Lebanon where he discovers that his dreams about his country are an illusion and that the exile in your homeland is by far the worst exile. Programmer's Note: Borhane Alaouié returns to Beirut from his exile. His documentary film constitutes a new letter at the start of the 21st century in reply to the letters of the 1980s. The reconstruction process appears to affect stones more than people.

Martial artist Ron Hall stars in this dark vampire thriller reminiscent of BLADE. Ambitious cop Derek (Hall) is dogged by a phobia that is unfortunate in his line of work. Having witnessed his father's murder as a young child, he is deathly afraid of blood, but when he takes the law into his own hands to catch underworld counterfeiter Gustoff Slovak, he is forced to face his fear. The operation blows up in his face, resulting in a massacre that leaves Derek the only one of his team to survive. Derek reaches the shocking conclusion that Slovak is actually a vampire, and joins forces with the last in a long line of vampire hunters, Master Kao, who agrees to train Derek in his ancient art. However, in order to combat Slovak--whose past intersects with Derek's own in disturbing ways--Derek must become that which he hates the most: a vampire.