The Beirut Spring Festival (Arabic: مهرجان ربيع بيروت; French: Le festival du printemps de Beyrouth) is an annual multidisciplinary arts and culture festival organised by the Samir Kassir Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon. It was founded in 2009 by Lebanese journalist Gisèle Khoury in memory of her husband, journalist, historian and writer Samir Kassir, who was assassinated in Beirut in 2005.
The festival presents theatre, music, dance, film, photography, installations, literary and public discussions, and other interdisciplinary work, using theatres as well as public and heritage spaces around the city. Its name is derived from Kassir's 4 March 2005 An-Nahar essay "Beyrouth, printemps des Arabes" ("Beirut, Spring of the Arabs").
A defining feature of the festival has been its emphasis on premieres, presenting international and regional productions, performances and artistic works that have not previously been shown in Lebanon. The festival has also historically maintained a free-admission policy, intended to broaden public access to cultural programming, particularly among younger audiences. As of September 2026, the festival has held eighteen editions.
History
Origins and establishment The festival was created by the Samir Kassir Foundation four years after Kassir's assassination. Khoury, who founded the foundation and later the festival, described the project as a way of making culture accessible to a broad public. Randa Asmar, a Lebanese actor and cultural practitioner, has been closely involved in the festival's programming from its early years and later became its director.
The first edition took place from 17 to 22 June 2009. Its programme included theatre, a multimedia installation, opera, contemporary performance, hip-hop and a public round table, with artists from Lebanon, Greece, Tunisia, France, Iran, Canada and the United Arab Emirates.
The second edition in 2010 included Moi, Anna Politkovskaïa, the contemporary ballet Pazzi, Ensemble Badila, Rayess Bek's Khartech 3al Zamann and a contemporary zajal production involving Zad Moultaka, Fadia Tomb El Hage and the Ars Nova Ensemble.
The festival expanded the range of participating artists during the following editions. In 2011 it hosted writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Egyptian band Massar Egbari, theatre and dance works, and a tribute to Lebanese singer Sabah.
The 2012 edition included Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh, Turkish musician Mercan Dede, Egyptian screenwriter Waheed Hamed and a tribute to Lebanese composer and singer Elie Choueiri.
In 2013, playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad was the festival's guest of honour. The programme included Incendies, Seuls, an encounter between Mouawad and Lebanese poet and critic Paul Chaoul, La Sentinelle with Jane Birkin, and a concert by Lebanese singer-songwriter Tania Saleh.
In 2014, the programme included Gandini Juggling's Smashed, Gravitational Waves, Issam Bou Khaled's Our Fathers, the discussion Voices of Hostages, and a concert involving Nasser Deen Al Touffar, Sayed Darwish and Hello Psychaleppo.
2015 expansion The seventh edition in 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Kassir's assassination. Instead of the festival's usual roughly week-long format, it ran from 3 May to 6 June and combined performance with exhibitions, debates and public-space projects.
The edition included Beirut Ideas, a series of eighteen discussions on freedom of expression and democratic change; the Change-Makers Forum; One Day in Beirut, a public photography exhibition involving more than one hundred photographers; and Alaa Minawi's light installation My Light Is Your Light. It concluded with Beirut, the Timeless City, a large-scale sound-and-light performance in Martyrs' Square conceived by Ivan Caracalla and incorporating music, poetry, orchestral performance, projections and Lebanese performers.
2016–2019 The festival returned to a more compact format in 2016. Its eighth edition included Alexis Moncorgé's adaptation of Stefan Zweig's Amok, a concert by Lebanese band Adonis, and Gandini Juggling's 4x4: Ephemeral Architectures.
The 2017 edition included Bridgman|Packer Dance, a concert by Bachar Mar-Khalifé, Rami Khalifé and Sary Khalifé, Tunisian singer Dorsaf Hamdani, and Carnivorous, a new theatre work by Issam Bou Khaled produced by the festival.
The tenth edition in 2018 included a photographic and sonic exhibition commemorating the Nakba, a concert by Egyptian-Palestinian musician Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, a tribute to Tunisian singer Lotfi Bouchnak, performances by British-Indian dancer and choreographer Aakash Odedra, and a production by the Yerevan State Puppet Theatre.
Lubnan album Bouchnak's appearance at the tenth Beirut Spring Festival led to the release later that summer of Lubnan (), a nine-track album associated with the Samir Kassir Foundation. Bouchnak had performed with his orchestra on 4 June 2018 at MusicHall, Starco Center, in a tribute jointly organised by the Beirut Spring Festival and the Lebanese Ministry of Culture.
According to contemporary reporting in Asharq Al-Awsat, Bouchnak decided after the festival appearance to offer an album dedicated to Lebanon and the Lebanese. Randa Asmar said that the audience for his festival concert exceeded 1,000 people and that the reception he received contributed to the decision. Proceeds from the album were directed to the Samir Kassir Foundation.
Bouchnak later clarified in an interview with Laha that he had not released the album independently: he had given the songs to the Samir Kassir Foundation, which then selected the album's title, design and presentation. The physical edition was launched and signed by Bouchnak at Dar El Nimer for Arts and Culture in Beirut on 26 July 2018. Dar El Nimer described the songs as having been "generously offered" by Bouchnak and stated that proceeds from the release contributed to the Foundation.
Asharq Al-Awsat reported that the CD contained nine songs, several of them being released for the first time. Publicly documented titles include "Lubnan" (لبنان), "Ajras al-Awda" (أجراس العودة), "Kul Yawm" (كل يوم), "Ta'azina" (تعازينا), "Mughanni al-Hayy" (مغني الحي) and "Tafa'al Ya Rouhi Bil-Kheir" (تفاءل يا روحي بالخير). The title song "Lubnan" was written by Ali Ajami and composed by Abdel Hakim Al-Qayed. Credits published with "Tafa'al Ya Rouhi Bil-Kheir" identify lyrics by Lebanese poet Alexi Constantine and music by Abdullah Marish; the recording was made at Bouchnak's studio in Tunisia and mixed by Mohsen Matri.
Later in July, Bouchnak performed material associated with the release during an appearance at the Tyre International Festival at Beaufort Castle, including "Ajras al-Awda" and a song reported as "بحبك يا لبنان بجنون".
In 2019 the festival presented pianist Alexandra Dariescu's multimedia work The Nutcracker and I, the migration-themed play The Raft, directed by Cyrine Gannoun and Majdi Bou-Matar, and Beirut the Sea Lover, a live multimedia and 3D-mapping performance at Beirut's Roman Baths inspired by Kassir's history of the city.
Pandemic and economic crisis, 2020–2022 The festival's usual format was interrupted in 2020 by Lebanon's political and economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. After the Beirut port explosion of 4 August, the organisers mounted an online edition titled For the Love of Beirut on 25 August and 1 September. It brought back artists from earlier editions, including Kinan Azmeh, Bachar Mar-Khalifé, Alexandra Dariescu and Bridgman|Packer Dance.
In 2021 the thirteenth edition, Culture in Time of Crisis, took the form of a two-day hybrid conference about cultural policymaking in Lebanon, co-produced with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and accompanied by performances.
Live multidisciplinary programming resumed in 2022 with a commissioned stand-up performance by Lebanese comedian Nour Hajjar, Dracula: The Untold Story by Imitating the Dog and Leeds Playhouse, and Chrystèle Khodr's listening performance Rise and Fall of Orient Swiss.
2023–present The fifteenth edition in 2023 presented The Last 15 Seconds, in tribute to Lebanese-Canadian theatre-maker Majdi Bou-Matar, and an Arabic-language presentation of Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit Red Rabbit, performed by Fouad Yammine. The Canadian company MT Space described the Beirut performances as the final stop of the thirteen-year tour of The Last 15 Seconds and as a return to Bou-Matar's country of origin.
Khoury died in October 2023. The 2024 edition was the first held after her death and was presented in her memory, with Asmar continuing as festival director. During the same period, as part of an ongoing process of institutional and digital development, the festival uplifted its visual identity and launched a new website consolidating its archive and documenting the programmes of all editions since its establishment in 2009. The 2024 programme included a public screening of season eight of the documentary series Zyara, the theatre work Mute, a concert for Palestine by Ziyad Sahhab and Rafic Abboud, and a spoken-word tribute to Khoury.
The seventeenth edition in 2025 coincided with the twentieth anniversary of Kassir's assassination. It included the public sound installation The Dream Manifesto, based on Kassir's 2004 text Bayan el Helm; the theatre production Jarret Ghaz Spéciale, dealing with Lebanese-Syrian memory and violence; a walking tour of sites associated with Kassir and Beirut; and, later in the summer, the photography exhibition 20 Years for Freedom.
In the same year, as part of Tech for Memory, a project launched by the Samir Kassir Foundation with funding from the European Union, the Foundation established Memory on Stage, a three-cycle artistic commissioning programme running across the 2025, 2026 and 2027 editions of the Beirut Spring Festival. Through annual calls for proposals, the programme invites artists, cultural practitioners and cultural organisations working in Lebanon to develop new theatre, music, dance, visual installation and multimedia projects engaging with memory, identity and cultural heritage. The first cycle, Memory on Stage 2025, resulted in the production of Jarret Ghaz Spéciale, which premiered during the seventeenth edition of the festival.
Originally scheduled for the spring, the eighteenth edition was postponed to 24 August–26 September 2026 amid the 2026 Iran war and its spillover into Lebanon. Locally based artists, cultural practitioners and cultural organisations were invited to submit new projects for the eighteenth edition of the festival. The call for applications Memory on Stage 2026 covered theatre, music, dance, visual installations and multimedia work and provided a total funding envelope of up to EUR 50,000 for selected projects. That edition comprised three multidisciplinary projects presented across eleven evenings and four venues in Beirut and Tripoli: Echoes of the North: The Unspoken Memory, combining documentary film and photography to explore memories of the Lebanese Civil War and the Syrian presence in northern Lebanon; A Lover's Manifesto P2: The Lebanese Experiment, Alfred Tarazi's film installation examining Beirut and Lebanon between 1920 and 1958; and Echoes of a City's Forgotten Heritage ... in C Minor, a film-performance documenting the restoration of Beirut's architectural heritage following the 2020 port explosion.