The easy answer is: we're from here.
The longer answer is that Beirut, for everything that makes it hard, has one quality that's almost impossible to manufacture anywhere else — a density of people doing exceptional creative work without the infrastructure that would make it easier. They do it because they love it. They do it because the alternative is not doing it. And the work, when it lands, has a quality of being made by hand that we haven't found in cities that have everything figured out.
We started MMNT to be one small piece of the infrastructure that those people deserve, for ourselves and for the people we love working with.
What we mean by the soil
Soil isn't a metaphor for "where you happen to be." Soil is what a thing is made of. The films we make are made of the city we make them in — the light, the friends we cast, the locations we keep coming back to, the small frustrations that force us to find a better way through.
We could move. We aren't going to. The work would be different, and we like the work the way it is.
What's next
A handful of films are in cut. A handful of essays are in draft. When they land they'll land here first.
We're not in a hurry.