Cyril Aris is a Lebanese Director & Screenwriter and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®. His feature documentary, ‘The Swing’ (2018), premiered in Karlovy Vary and won awards in El-Gouna, Rome, London, Budapest and Tunisia, with the Hollywood reporter calling it an ‘intimate and moving […] meditation on truth, love and lies in the face of illness and death’. His fiction short ‘The President’s Visit’ (2017), premiered in Toronto (TIFF) and won awards in Dubai, Nashville, and the National Board of Review. Aris holds an MFA from Columbia University and is in development for ‘It’s a Sad and Beautiful World’, recipient of a development grant from the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderun in Germany, selected at the TIFF Filmmaker Lab, the Nantucket Screenwriter Colony, the CineGouna platform in Egypt, a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris, and won the ART award at the Beirut Cinema Platform.