She directed her first short
Raddem and the documentary
Seule avec la guerre (1999). Having never studied film in school, Arbid says her inspiration comes from "art, photography, people in the street and of course film". Her first three Conversation de Salon I-III where featured at the
Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and received the
Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Interested in different narrative forms, her work alternates between; fiction, first person documentaries and video essays; with an experimentation of the intersecting of genres. She was one of the founding members of the Lebanese film festival Né à Beyrouth in 2001. In 2011, Danielle Arbid also directed the
Beirut Hotel TV-movie for Arte aired during prime time, becoming one of the channel's most popular fiction broadcasts in 2012. Her third fiction feature,
Parisienne won the Académie Lumière foreign press prize, as well as other awards including the Best Actress prize at
Les Arcs in 2016.
Parisienne (film) had its world première at the
Toronto International Film Festival.
Simple Passion is her fourth feature film. It was also selected in the
San Sebastián International Film Festival,
Toronto International Film Festival,
Zurich Film Festival,
Busan International Film Festival,
Les Arcs Film Festival, Lisboa & Cintra Film Festival, and the Lumière Festival. Simple Passion obtained rave reviews from the international press - including The Telegraph, the Guardian, TimeOut, Culture Fix, Sight and Sound, Film Hounds,
Film Threat. Five retrospectives have been held around Danielle Arbid's films at the
Gijón International Film Festival in 2007, Bastia Festival in 2007, Paris Cinéma in 2007, the
Festival de la Fiction at
La Rochelle, France, in 2008 and Festival Dei Popoli Florence in 2016. Her videos were presented at the
Centre Pompidou, the
Vienna Museum of Art, the
MAC VAL, Fondation Boghossian (Belgium), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (France). In 2018, she also directed
Le Feu au cœur, a short film for the
Paris Opéra. A documentary about her work titled "Danielle Arbid, un chant de bataille" was produced in 2017 in the prestigious collection "Cinéastes de notre temps" created by André S. Labarthe, former critic of
Cahiers du Cinéma. As an actress, she has worked in few films, including '
(2013) and ' (2015). She is also an
art photographer who exhibited at numerous galleries, including the Galerie Cinéma in Paris, Photomed Beirut, and
Rouge L'Expo. == Filmography ==