This paper interrogates the local popularity and international success of Ziad Doueiry’s film The Insult within the context of contested memory politics and ensuing controversy that continues to surround his work. His film, which depicts a courtroom feud between a Palestinian and a Christian that has them recalling old civil war wounds, comes two decades after the Lebanese civil war and belongs to a larger body of Lebanese war cinema that emerges within a framework of state-sponsored amnesia. While the film’s success was in many ways unprecedented, it has also been met with backlash particularly from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that accused Doueiry of promoting a Zionist agenda. In this paper, I explore the film’s treatment of memory politics and the claims it makes about mnemonic hegemonies to understand its reception among these different local and transnational publics. I begin by situating the film within its larger media context to interrogate the technologies of recognition that structure its circulation, reception, and ultimate success. I show how the circumstances surrounding the writing of the script and the release of the film largely determined how the polemic messages of the film were framed and absorbed. This discussion is simultaneously framed by scholarship that assesses the circulation of films from the Global South in international film festivals and markets (Lazaro-Robel, Falicov, Shih, Frederic). By comparing a number of contexts of reception, namely local and international film reviews, I not only show how the circulation of the film limited the discursive parameters surrounding the issue of the civil war, but I also elucidate the dialectical relationship and dynamics that exist between transnational and local contexts of reception.