Welcome to Beirut, Lebanon where you can be everything you want to be - among the glitterati in sky high clubs with polished heels, discussing politics among the expatriot intelligentsia in bohemian backdoors, or setting up an evening Nargileh (water pipe) outpost in your car on the Corniche. Even as an observer of Beirut’s many worlds - the contradictions, the contrasts, the tragedies - I feel the unmistakable heartbeat, the pulsing arteries filled with suffocating cigarette fumes and a persistent, intense desperation to stay alive.

It’s an idea I revisit often noting that the grandest improvisers I know are always immigrants. Immigrants who are rarely reliant on manuals, directions, courses, or packaged kits, because such inventions are over packaged frills for settled people, not fluid, transcendental, adapting newbies(ish). “We are still building our house on sticky foundation, so we bring our roots with us…or we make use of what we find”.

Check out our video pick: K’Naan’s This is Africa (T.I.A.).

Adele Free Pham is an independent filmmaker based out of New York City. Her 2008 film “Parallel Adele” has screened at numerous festivals internationally, and is distributed by Third World News Reel. Currently, she is producing “The Transition” documentary on Obama campaign workers after the election and its effect on their lives, as well as “Fine Threads”, portraits of South Asian teenage women growing up in Queens, NY.

The Sheikh’s Batmobile is the product of pop-culturalist Richard Poplak’s two-year search for hallmarks of North American culture – “pop songs, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, shoot ‘em up video games, muscle cars and punk music” – in the least likely of places: the Muslim world.