Events › Films at the Library: The Lebanese Burger Mafia

Join us at the library for a wide variety of films!

The meaty saga of a rogue fast-food chain with mysterious origins, a cult following, and a secret pathway to the immigrant dream. This documentary features the highs, lows and legacy of the Burger Baron chain, featuring stories from around Alberta.  

Event time includes a Q &A with filmmaker Omar Mouallem after the screening!

Film is 103 minutes (2023) Rated PG for coarse language

English language audio with English subtitles

Omar Mouallem is an author, filmmaker, and educator, and the editor-in-chief of Edify magazine. 

His book How Muslims Shaped the Americas was named one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2021, and his documentary The Lebanese Burger Mafia, which documents the unlikely link between fast-food and Lebanon’s civil war, was nominated for a James Beard Media Award honouring the world’s best food-related storytelling. 

Omar is also the “fake dean” of Pandemic University School of Writing, a virtual school he founded in support of writers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. OmarMouallem.com | X: @omouallem

Meet our Q&A moderator, Dr Julie Rak!

Julie Rak (Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. 

She researches extraordinary life stories by so-called ordinary people, and she also likes mushroom burgers! Her latest book is False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021). She has written extensively on nonfiction, including Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). With Sonia Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Laurie McNeill she wrote The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022). 

Her current research is about contemporary analog journaling and the postdigital.