"A space for handmade practices across mediums, where what matters is not only what is made, but how it is made."

Barr is an independent artistic company founded by us, three sisters Angèle, Michelle, and Noel Keserwany. It emerged from a shared need to create a space where our practices could meet and nourish one another freely, through film, music, workshops, publications, and collaborations that search for new ways of telling stories and engaging with the realities around us.

We are daughters of a farmer and a wooden furniture maker, and we grew up surrounded by handmade work, patience, and attention to material. Watching our father cultivate the land taught us something essential about rhythm, care, and unpredictability ; about barr (برّ): the land, the wilderness. A place where creation can only stay alive by working flexibly alongside its ever- changing environment, rather than by trying to fully control it. For us, artistic disciplines are not separate fields but connected languages that constantly nourish one another.

Michelle and Noel, both graduates with Master’s degrees in Artistic Direction in Lebanon, spent more than a decade writing, directing, and self-producing politically engaged music videos and visual campaigns before making their debut short film Les Chenilles, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2023. The film went on to receive numerous awards internationally, including the El Gouna Gold Star for Best Arab Short Film (El Gouna Film Festival, 2023), the Audience Award (Champs-Élysées Film Festival, 2023), the Jury Prize (Malmö Arab Film Festival, 2023), the Silver Crown Award (Le Cri du Court, 2023), Best Actress and Best Screenplay (Mieres Film Festival, 2023), the Jury Prize (Mizna Arab Art, 2023), and the Scarlet Pomegranate Award for Best Short Film (MENA Film Festival, 2024), as well as being pre-selected for the César Awards in France (2024).

Their relationship to filmmaking was built in an autodidactic way, by inventing their own methods of writing, filming, producing, and working collectively. Alongside their fiction and documentary projects currently in development, they have collaborated internationally on cultural campaigns, social causes, mentorship programs, and artistic development processes.

Angèle Keserwany, an architect specialized in earthen architecture and natural construction, trained through the CRAterre Master’s program in France, is also a multidisciplinary artist. She develops installations, documentaries, and workshops that connect ecological building practices with cinema and collective creation. Her work explores how natural ways of building and inhabiting spaces can themselves become tools for storytelling, transmission, and encounter.

Barr remains deeply handmade in its approach, rooted in where it comes from, attentive to people, and shaped by collaboration. In a world where narratives are constantly being produced and manipulated, we believe in creating works and spaces that remain grounded, sensitive, and deeply human.