Baalbeck Studios began operating at the very beginning of 1963 in a large white stone building surrounded by pine trees in Sin Al-Fil, the same location where the Lebanese Recording Company (LRC) had previously been operating in the 1950s. The company’s object was listed in the 1965 Annuaire des Sociétés Libanaises Par Actions as the "production of feature-length and short films, TV programs, radio programs, commercials, music records, etc.” Baalbeck Studios was a thriving and active presence at the intersection of Lebanon’s progressive and booming, yet disparate, business and arts sectors. For decades, Baalbeck Studios was the source of many of the visual and audio tracks experienced and consumed in Lebanon, as well as in other Arab countries such as Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. Commercial, documentary, and feature film directors, producers, and editors, along with singers and voice-over artists, all flocked to the Baalbeck Studios to collaborate, record, and experiment with its equipment and laboratory.

Despite the integral role Baalbeck Studios played in Lebanon and the region’s cultural history, the company ceased operations, and in early 2010 the Baalbeck Studios building was earmarked for demolition. UMAM D&R, dedicated to collecting Lebanon’s memories and archives, intercepted and salvaged the remaining analog film and written materials. Some of the material saved had been very badly affected by passing time, attacks during the civil war, fire, and looting, all of which make it impossible to establish how much has been lost.

For the past thirteen years, UMAM D&R has been preserving, processing, and organizing significant amounts of written documents and leftover film materials.

The written archive includes the following materials:

• Office folders that date back to the 1960s and early 1970s and include a large number of folders related to accounting and financial matters; folders for the many suppliers to Baalbeck Studios; folders dedicated to 16 and 35mm film; and folders for the Laboratoires Franay Tirages Cinématographiques (LTC) in Saint-Cloud, France. 
• Folders dedicated to specific film productions with the name of the film, the producer or director, and the year of production on the sleeve. The collection includes popular films made in the 1960s and 1970s that have a starring role in the collective memory of much of the Arab world. Some of the film production folders contain only a few dozen pages, while others are filled with over a hundred documents; some merely give insight into limited exchanges between the company and labs, most often based in France, whereas others allow one to gain detailed insight into the production, including anecdotes, challenges faced, and financial matters. 
• Staff folders that provide an insight into how the company was run, individual careers, and, at times, precious mosaic pieces of personal and family histories. The folders are full of invoices and documents and often also contain handwritten comments that not only gave insight into the running of the most successful sound studio in the region and one of the most advanced film processing labs, but also into the strong personalities that dreamed about, worked for, and built Baalbeck Studios.

In partnership with the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, a project was conceived to digitize the analog film elements and paper documents also with the aim to make the material accessible for research purposes in the future. Funding for this extensive digitization project was provided by the German Federal Foreign Office's Cultural Heritage Program in 2022 and 2023.

This film material, primarily black and white and often without corresponding audio, consists of fragments from newsreels, commercials, trailers, and a few feature films; all of which provide a mesmerizing medley of snapshots of pre-war Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s. After digitizing and analyzing the delicate and fragile material, UMAM D&R and Arsenal have been able to piece together works by both well-known and lost-to-history producers and directors, preserving a contrasting mix of legacies of modernity and tradition, weddings and protest marches, and ancient ruins and parliamentary sessions.