Cyril Aris is a Lebanese Director & Screenwriter. His debut feature documentary, The Swing (2018) premiered at the 53rd Karlovy Vary IFF, won the El-Gouna Bronze Star Award, and jury prizes at Rome's Medfilm Festival and Tunisia’s Manarat Film Festival, and awards at London’s Open City Docs, the Budapest International Documentary Festival. The Hollywood Reporter called it ‘Intimate and moving […] meditation on truth, love and lies in the face of illness and death’.
His last fiction short film, The President’s Visit (2017), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), won the US National Board of Review (NBR) grant award, was shortlisted for a student BAFTA, won the Muhr jury prize at the Dubai IFF, and the oscar-qualifying grand jury prize at the Nashville Film Festival. It played in over 60 film festivals worldwide.
Previous credits include short film Siham (2013), jury award at the Palm Springs ShortFest, LBC’s TV series Beirut, I Love You (2011, 2012), and Yahoo’s web-series Fasateen (2012), which both gathered several million views.
Since 2019, Aris is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® and a voting member in the branches of short films and feature animations.
Aris holds an MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York, and has taught Film at Columbia University, NHSI at Northwestern University and Barnard College, and is currently in development for his first fiction feature, ‘It’s a Sad and Beautiful World ’, selected for the TIFF Filmmaker Lab in 2019, the Screenwriter Colony in Nantucket, and won the ART award and a residency at Paris’ Cité-des-Arts at the 4th Beirut Cinema Platform.
Editing credits include American-Filippino feature film Death of Nintendo (2020) directed by Raya Martin, and selected at the Venice Gap Financing Market at the 76th Venice Film Festival.
Producing credits include short film Submarine (2016), directed by Mounia Akl, official selection at the 69th Cannes Film Festival (Cinefondation competition), as well as TIFF, SxSW and over 100 festivals worldwide. It won the Jury Award in Dubai and was Staff picked by Vimeo, receiving 350,000+ views.