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When historical events are too complex and sprawling to do them justice in a 90-minute film, the best thing is to shrink the aperture. Rather than try cramming in years’ worth of religious, political, and geographic conflict— such as that of the almost-two-decades-long Lebanese Civil War—focus on its impact instead. What was it like to live in Beirut as an emotionally, culturally rich life is suddenly turned upside-down by bombings and gunfire while numerous militias are formed, numerous governments are dismantled, and the threat of being kidnapped or killed is beyond real? Such is the experience French-Lebanese director Chloé Mazlo’s grandmother endured in the late 1970s, and the backdrop for the stories she told about loving both country and family.

Mazlo and co-writer Yacine Badday craft a narrative from those pieces of the past to portray the flashbacked account of a Swiss woman (Alba Rohrwacher’s Alice) in Beirut.

A buttoned-up young woman in 2011 Damascus is lured by the possibility of personal liberation when a brothel opens upstairs in debuting director Gaya Jiji’s fuzzily reasoned “My Favorite Fabric.” Inspired by “Belle du Jour,” though with little of that classic’s trenchant subversiveness, this thematically ambitious femme-centric drama aims to weave together the repressiveness of Syria’s regime with the limited possibilities for female self-expression within that society. The results are uncertain and artificial, full of missed chances that bode ill for a screen life outside a French release and a few festivals.

Life in Syria is becoming increasingly difficult, so for a middle-class family like that of Salwa (Souraya Baghdadi), a woman alone with three daughters, the best way of leaving behind the bombings is to find husbands for her offspring. Nahla (Manal Issa) is the oldest: Flinty and petulant, she clothes herself in dowdy garments that aim to hide an overripe sensuality.