Beirut Film Society · Canada
أيام السينما اللبنانية في كندا
The people who
made it happen
Lebanon Cinema Days in Canada ran on the generosity of seventy businesses, artists and broadcasters. Not one of them had to say yes. This is who they are — and what we hope you will let them do for you.
The first names on this sponsor list are our own. That is not an accident, and it is not something we are embarrassed by — it is the whole argument.
Before we asked a single florist, restaurant or radio station to back Lebanese cinema in Canada, the people running this festival put their own businesses on the line first. We do not ask anyone to stand somewhere we are not already standing.
Founding Pillars
Piliers fondateurs 3 · here before there was a listThree did not join the sponsor list. They were standing here before there was a list to join — the society in Lebanon that started all of it, and the two Canadian firms belonging to the people who run this edition.
Beirut Film Society
None of the Canadian editions exist without the house in Lebanon. BFS has worked since 2007, formally registered in 2017, under the banner Cinema for a Cause — and from there runs Beirut Shorts, the first Academy-Award-qualifying festival in Lebanon, now in its nineteenth edition.
Sam Lahoud founded BFS and presides over it in both countries; as a producer his credits include Void, Lebanon's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards. With Isaac Fahed he also runs Berytus Production in Beirut — the house that finds the films, secures the rights and gets them to Canada. Without the films, the rest is a room with the lights on.
Behind them is a team on either side of the water, more of them than this page has room to name. Doris Saba, Executive Director in Lebanon, builds the programme for the Canadian edition and coordinates with the artists who travel from Beirut.
Chamoun Legal
Patricia Chamoun is Vice-President of Beirut Film Society Canada, and her Montreal law firm is a Strategic Sponsor of the festival she helps run. She also opened her cabins at Mont-Tremblant to our guests. Between the legal work, the sponsorship, the guest list and the hospitality, it is fair to say a meaningful share of this festival passes across her desk before it reaches a stage — and none of it is billed.
Le Groupe Curyeux
Roni Daoud is Treasurer of Beirut Film Society Canada, and Curyeux — la clinique des yeux — is his. Sponsoring the festival was the smaller half of what he gave it. The larger half was the machinery: the accounts, the email, the ticketing, the billing, the sponsor records and the modernisation programme that now lets an all-volunteer organisation invoice like a professional one. Cheques are spent in a night. Infrastructure is still there in the morning.
Most of this was never paid for
A festival that can show a sponsor what their money did is offering a partnership. One that cannot is asking for charity.
Read the list below as a ledger and you will read it wrong. A great many of these names never sent an invoice at all. A telecoms firm gave the festival its phone system. A distributor in Beirut found the films. A florist dressed the room, a limousine company moved the guests, and five cabins in the Laurentians housed people who had nowhere to sleep.
Some gave money. More gave the thing they happen to be good at, which is harder to count and worth more than the counting suggests.
Across nine cities in a single year — Montréal, Laval, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver, Windsor, Waterloo and Saint-Eustache — thirty-eight screenings and events sold more than 2,500 tickets, with a further 500 given to guests.
Behind that, hundreds of volunteers and service providers, and nobody on staff drawing a salary. The names on this page are how a budget that small reaches an audience that size.
The Sponsors
Les commanditaires 67 · who owed us nothing
And then, the people who said yes
Not a logo. A lectern, a full house, and four hundred people who came to listen.
Everything above this line is family. Everything below it is a choice somebody made who owed us nothing. The list begins where the festival begins — with the name that carried the largest single contribution of the 2025 edition.
Jadco Corporation
Presenting Sponsor
Founded in 1987 by Edmond Doudak and still run by the family four decades later — more than eight million square feet built, six thousand rental homes, a portfolio the firm places at $2.6 billion.
“We're not merchant developers; we're an investment company. Our model is the long-term value creation model — and we build to own.”
André Doudak, President & CEOA company that keeps what it builds thinks in decades, and it showed in how they backed us: early, and without conditions. Early money is what lets a festival book a theatre at all. Everything else on this page followed from it.
Seventy partners stood behind the 2025 edition. Three are told in full above as founding pillars — they appear again in the list below, lightly, rather than twice at length. The sixty-nine sponsoring organisations are arranged by the tier they gave at — or, if you prefer, by what they actually do.
Some of it you can see
The limousine at the kerb is Link Limousines. The flowers in the lobby are La Grâce des Fleurs. The phone the box office answered is EMAK Telecom’s. The films themselves came through Berytus, in Beirut.
None of it appears in a bank statement. All of it is on this page, because a contribution you cannot invoice is still a contribution — and the people who made it deserve to be named beside the people who wrote cheques.
Soyez les premiers informés
Dévoilement de la programmation, préventes en primeur et nouvelles du festival. Quelques courriels par année, jamais plus.