Seven-year-old Fadi Wahbeh sits cross-legged on the smooth stone floor of his childhood home in Damascus, his small fingers clutching the awkward bulk of a Polaroid camera.
Early pictures show his family crowded into the frame, the result of careful posing for a single snap. Those first images opened the door to a lifetime of documenting the world and reshaping Arab cinema.
“I kept nagging my parents to get me a camera,” he recalls. When they finally relented, the young Wahbeh became an obsessive archivist, photographing friends and documenting trips to the seaside with twenty kids squeezed impossibly into tiny frames. “I still have those photos back home in Damascus,” he smiles.
That early fascination with capturing reality would eventually lead him to one of cinema's most complex questions: how do we tell stories that challenge official narratives while respecting ethical boundaries?
From snapshots to cinema
Today, as Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi, Wahbeh is at the forefront of exploring hybrid storytelling, artificial intelligence in filmmaking, and the delicate art of giving voice to marginalized narratives.
His cinematic awakening came through an Italian film, Il Posto, screened when he was a teenager. The black-and-white feature inspired him to understand film beyond entertainment.
“I started making short videos and began writing scripts,” he remembers. Armed with a home camera, he and his friends created “maybe 29 films,” in which they mimicked what they saw on the American cable television channel MTV.
But the path to filmmaking wasn't straightforward. After his teenage years of creative experimentation, Wahbeh faced new challenges upon arriving in the US for college.
His parents insisted on traditional studies — dentistry, engineering, or law. He chose dentistry. During his first year, when a lab professor needed someone to photograph and document experiments, Wahbeh volunteered. “As soon as I finished, I registered for a film class as an elective. And the rest is history,” he says.
After completing his BA in Cinematic Arts with a focus on directing, Wahbeh made a decisive pivot. He pursued an MFA in Documentary Production and Studies from the University of North Texas, deliberately choosing what he considered the more difficult path. Where fiction allowed complete control, documentaries demanded understanding people on their terms.
“I wasn’t working with actors, I didn’t have a script, and I didn’t have a budget,” he explains. “The subjects were telling me their stories, rather than me telling them what to say.”
This philosophy drove him to spend summers in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, giving free workshops out of his own pocket. “I had my own cameras,” he says. “I'd go there and stay for a week or 10 days with barely any sponsorship, teaching people to find stories that highlighted unheard voices in the region.”
This grassroots approach led him to Abu Dhabi, where he led a documentary program, creating six or seven films that screened at international festivals.
Ethics, AI, and Arab history
Since joining NYUAD in 2016, initially as a film production supervisor, Wahbeh has expanded his role to teaching docu-fiction, along with short fiction film production and documentary filmmaking — merging his twin passions for documentary and narrative cinema.
His current research focuses on the ethical integration of artificial intelligence in filmmaking, exploring thorny questions about consent, voice replication, and digital performance modeling. When a student wanted to use Tom Cruise's voice, Wahbeh insisted on finding “someone who sounds exactly like Tom Cruise” and paying him properly.
In Spring 2026, Wahbeh is serving as Creative Producer and Supervisor on a 30-episode short-form series co-produced with a local UAE production house and developed specifically for the UAE market.
The project is co-developed with a professor from Zayed University, who leads the Arabic writing component. In his role, Wahbeh shapes the series’ overall creative vision and narrative identity, overseeing development and production to ensure coherence across episodes.
One of his current most ambitious projects is a three-part documentary series scheduled for release in late 2026, which examines an epic battle that helped shape the Arab historical narrative.
Employing a docu-fiction approach alongside sit-down interviews and investigative research, Wahbeh explores how oral history and legend evolve into recorded history, weaving together pre-Islamic poetry, historical sources, and critical analysis to interrogate the boundaries between myth, memory, and fact.
“I don’t want people to be emotionally invested,” he says. “I want them to be critically thinking throughout the film.”
Beyond that, he's writing his first feature fiction film, to be shot in Syria — a character-driven story about two brothers set just before the recent political upheaval.
“I am currently working with a professional script writer and hoping that within the next two years I'll be able to shoot in Damascus,” he says. “It’s a reflection of my own life and something I hope to submit to festivals, not for exposure, but because the story is really powerful and deserves to be told.”
