Born on 1 April 1941 in Arnoun, in southern Lebanon, Alaouié came of age in a region marked by profound social and political change. He studied film directing at INSAS in Brussels, graduating in 1970, before returning to Lebanon to develop a body of work shaped by displacement, war, memory, social justice, and the difficult possibility of connection.
His early films announced a cinema committed to both formal sensitivity and historical witness. After the short works Affiche contre affiche and Forrière, he made Kafr Kassem, a major work centred on the 1956 massacre in the Palestinian village of Kafr Kassem.
In 1981, he directed Beirut the Encounter, a landmark film set during the Lebanese Civil War. Through the attempted meeting of two young people separated by the divided city, the film gives form to the emotional and geographical fractures of Beirut.
Alaouié continued to work across fiction and documentary, creating films that followed people and societies through conflict, exile, reconstruction, and uncertainty. His cinema remained attentive to individual lives while never turning away from the larger histories that shaped them.
Alongside his filmmaking, Alaouié taught film directing in Lebanon for many years, passing his experience and commitment to younger generations. He helped establish a language for Lebanese cinema that could hold personal memory and collective history together.
Borhane Alaouié died in Brussels in September 2021. His films remain essential works of Lebanese and Arab cinema, continuing to speak to audiences through their humanity, political clarity, and belief in the power of images to preserve what history threatens to erase.