Sirens Q&A with Director Rita Baghdadi, Producer Natasha Lyonne, Lilas Mayassi, and Alma Doumani

Q&A with SIRENS director Rita Baghdadi, executive producer Natasha Lyonne, and cast members Lilas Mayassi and Alma Doumani at the Angelika Film Center in New York City on September 30, 2022. ABOUT THE FILM SIRENS intimately chronicles the lives and music of Slave to Sirens, a band made up of five young metalheads whose burgeoning fame is set against the backdrop of the Lebanese revolution. Its members wrestle with friendship, sexuality, and destruction as their music serves as a refuge to Beirut’s youth culture. At the band’s core are its two founding members, Lilas Mayassi and Shery Bechara, whose complicated relationship and subsequent tense fallout threatens the very fabric of the band. An even greater looming threat, however, is Lebanon’s criminalization of homosexuality, as well as the wholly devastating effects of their country’s political regime. Despite their obvious challenges, the members of Slave to Sirens persist in trying to create a revolution of their own: living t