This year once again, Mudam and the Luxembourg City Film Festival are joining forces to present a special screening at Cinéma Utopia for lovers of cinema and contemporary art.

Treat Me Like Your Mother is the first film by photographer and director Mohamad Abdouni. This intimate photo-documentary gives voice to four Lebanese trans women: Em Abed, Jamal Abdo, Antonella and Mama Jad.

Through their personal archives, interwoven with family images from his own collection, the director situates these singular trajectories within four decades of Lebanese political history. From the civil war to recent political upheavals, from the first state-funded gender-affirming surgery in 1997 to the gradual disappearance of safe spaces, the film retraces a little-known queer and national history.

Carried by an unprecedented photographic archive – the first dedicated to trans women in Lebanon – the film portrays a close-knit community of friends, united by familial bonds or as the title suggests, by a shared sense of chosen motherhood.

Biography:

Born in 1989 in Beirut, Mohamad Abdouni is a photographer, filmmaker, and creative director of Cold Cuts, a magazine dedicated to queer cultures of the SWANA region. A graduate in Fine Arts from the Lebanese Academy, he documents forgotten queer histories through film and archival work. His works, including Treat Me Like Your Mother, have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals. Mohamad Abdouni received the Lafayette Anticipations Prize in 2023.