Laura Marks explores whether there is a similar lineage of women and video in the Middle East as there is in the West, starting with feminist uses of the medium. Marks focuses on the development of independent media production in Beirut. She points to ways in which the West is a central reference point for Beiruti women film and video makers in order to analyze the ways independent film and video is intercultural -- the local is inextricable from the global. She draws a history of Middle Eastern film and video production as it relates to the West, and analyses its current development, using Beirut as a case study. In doing so, Marks contextualizes the varied art production of contemporary Middle-Eastern women video artists. The essay outlines the identity politics that are crucial to women's video production in the Middle East with a focus on the types of foreign monetary investment that work benefits from. The essay concludes by exemplifying a diverse range video work in order to explore how categorizing video production along gender lines may not be as productive as looking at the ways in which the intersecting topics of local and global politics and gender are taken up by both Lebanese men and women video artists.