Episode 53: Love is Blind Habibi reunites and leaves an impression on the world

In this week’s episode, Enas Refaei, Farah Andrews and Maan Jalal start the show on a celebratory note after Culture Bites won a bronze prize for best co-hosts at this year’s Signal Awards. The annual awards honour the world’s most impactful podcasts in several categories, with winners selected either by a jury or by public votes.

Only weeks after Love is Blind Habibi started streaming, the show’s cast gathered for a highly anticipated reunion, in which fans finally found out which pairs stayed together and which unions fell apart. The Culture Bites hosts highlight the show’s success not just across the region, but around the world, where audiences learnt more about Arab marriage customs and the role families play. They discuss the tensions that unfold at the reunion, as well as the participants’ stereotype-busting personas.

Last week, the home of the late Lebanese artist Abdul-Hamid Baalbaki was destroyed by Israeli forces amid the continuing war in Lebanon. The house had doubled as an arts centre, which remained open to the public even after Baalbaki’s death in 2013. Not only was he an artist, but he was also a collector of precious pieces, some that date back to the first millennium BCE. Enas, Farah and Maan reflect on the tragic erasure of art during conflict and the challenging efforts to collect and archive it.

On the theme of cultural preservation, the hosts highlight notable Palestinian documentaries to watch, on the heels of Palestine Cinema Days which took place last weekend. The team discuss The Wanted 18, a partly-animated story about a Palestinian village that buys cows to stop relying on Israeli milk. Another is Aida Returns, a story about director Carol Mansour’s mother who struggles with Alzheimer’s but vividly remembers the hometown of her youth, Jaffa, up until her final return to it.