The film company
About Fanous
An independent production company making films about the places, people and memories that refuse to be left behind.
What is Fanous
A lantern carried into the places that shaped us.
Fanous — Arabic for lantern — is an independent documentary film company rooted in the stories that hold our collective memory. We make films that look beneath the headlines, at exile, identity, survival and return — work grounded in a deep, firsthand relationship with the region and the people who live through it.
What we make
Documentary film
Feature-length creative documentaries that follow people — not events — through the most defining moments of their lives. Stories that stay with you because they are rooted in real, long-term relationships between filmmaker and subject.
How we work
Independent, by choice
Fanous operates independently — no agenda beyond the story, no editorial compromise. Our films have been supported by European broadcasters and cultural funds, and have screened at international festivals across the Arab world, Europe, and beyond.
Founder
Lina Sinjab
Lina Sinjab is a Syrian journalist, independent producer, and documentary filmmaker based between London and Beirut. She has spent over two decades as a BBC Middle East correspondent, covering the uprisings in Syria, Yemen, and Libya from the ground.
Her films include Voices from Homs (2012), Suryyat (2013 — nominated for a One Media Award, BBC), and Madness in Aleppo (2019 — winner, Best Documentary, Buenos Aires International Film Festival; screened at Hong Kong International Documentary Festival, Amman International Film Festival, and others). In 2013, she received the International Media Cutting Edge Award for her reporting from the Syrian conflict.
Fanous Productions is the home for her creative documentary work — films that grow from years of presence, trust, and a refusal to look away.
The work
Films
Released
Death is Hard Work, Khaled
Renowned Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa is determined to stay in war-torn Damascus while most of his friends were forced to leave. His friend Lina documents his persistence — until destiny takes a fatal turn.
In development
Gardenia
An all-female Syrian choir tours the country to break social and religious barriers through music — as a new government tightens its grip and the space for women shrinks.