The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures.

-- Dir. Nour Ouayda - 2023 - 27min - Lebanon, Canada --

Critic’s Award for Best Short Film, Gabès Cinema Fen, Tunis
International Competition Award, Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris
Honorable Mention International Competition, Media City Film Festival, Canada

"Nour Ouayda re-imagines the world solely through the juxtaposition of her impressionistic street photography and her tale of the secret garden. In other words, a meeting between the real and the possible.” - Special Mention NEW:VISION Competition, CPH:DOX

"embodied 16mm camera searches the richly coloured flora emerging from the walls and pavements. Appearing only in moments of myth and legend, these secret gardens have been said to be a place of refuge for political dissidents" - Open City Documentary Festival

"The Secret Garden’ unfolds like a psychogeographic reverie, departing from Beirut’s built environment like a daydream, much like the growth patterns of the plants it depicts.” - International Documentary Association

"At times, Beirut strikes us as a city reeling from a disaster, a past destruction: a city where life is resuming, where perennial plants patch up the holes carved out by explosions. As the camera explores and scans its surroundings, the plants shoot up like creatures or bizarre apparitions." - Cinema du Reel

“Ouayda has a talent for casting the familiar as unfamiliar. Occasionally, as the narration builds to a dramatic beat, Ouayda will violently shake the camera or increase the speed of the editing, rupturing the otherwise lulling quality of the recitation. Shots of nature eventually give way to a more urban milieu, broaching the idea that the plants are either being domesticated by humans or are silently waiting for a moment to strike. It’s a lo-fi ‘War of the Worlds’, a fantasy epic conveyed via the simplest means.” - In Review Online

"manoeuvres with urban transformation, societal shifts, altered perceptions, and the intricate relationship surrounding our immediate environments." - Kadist

"“Pairing grainy documentary images of the flora of Beirut with a voice-over fable of plants suddenly taking over the city, this experimental short plays with science- fiction tropes to obliquely evoke a political allegory of urban transformation, renewal, and estrangement.” - Three Fold Press

"Ouayda plays with science-fiction tropes to obliquely evoke a political allegory of transformation, renewal and estrangement. The garden as refuge, the garden as elsewhere, the garden as everywhere: is the arrival of these new, nonhuman inhabitants an end or a beginning, a threat or a promise?" - Viennale