“I don't know what has made me focus on these kinds of social issues. I could be doing documentaries about so many other subjects,” laughs award-winning filmmaker Carol Mansour. “Maybe because I live in a region where there's a lot of injustice. It's my way of protesting, instead of taking up arms and going to war.”

The Lebanese-Palestinian director's films, whose topics range from the lives of Sri Lankan maids in Beirut to the Lebanese war with Israel, have been well-received within Lebanon and internationally, and have won awards in festivals from Italy to New Zealand. Three of Mansour's acclaimed short documentaries will be screened this Saturday as part of the second annual Calgary Arab Film Festival (CAFF): 100% Asphalt, about street kids in Cairo; Invisible Children, about child labour in Beirut; and her latest, I Come From a Beautiful Place, about non-Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

“We're very excited about Carol Mansour — that series of shorts is the festival's edgiest content,” says CAFF's executive director Moness Rizkalla. “It really kind of bares our soul. They're stories about how life is hard for some folks.”

The films hold back on sentimentalizing music or statistic-heavy narration, and allow the subjects to talk about their realities in their own words. I Come From a Beautiful Place, for example, features five refugees from Iraq and Sudan telling their personal stories, but doesn't spend much time discussing the geopolitical contexts of either country. Mansour's aim is more on illuminating the human side of stories often ignored by media, politicians and the general public.

Before interviewing Mansour, I'm not sure what to expect. I've seen the bloody clips from A Summer Not to Forget, which includes very explicit footage of Lebanese civilians in the 2006 war between Lebanon's Hezbollah and Israel. I've seen the photos of Mansour holding her camera up with a Herculean bicep, her sun-beaten face glowing below a mass of wild auburn curls; of her grinning in the back of a van in Iraq, arms folded across her bullet-proof vest.

But when I call her Sunday morning at her family's home in Montreal, she greets me as warmly as if we had known each other for years. Mansour has an ample laugh and a voice that burns with unstoppable energy. She's opinionated, and sometimes bounces between thoughts mid-sentence, as if the ideas were rushing out so fast she had to jump to catch up to them.

Mansour has been up since 6 a.m., working on her latest project, a film about Lebanese women's need for the right to pass their citizenship on to their spouse and children. She is only in Montreal for a few days and then it's back to Beirut, so deadlines are imminent. But for the moment, she's in the kitchen drinking coffee and is happy to sit back and chat.

“In all my documentaries, I try to be universal,” says Mansour. “I Come From a Beautiful Place begins by saying, 'This is about refugees in Lebanon, but it could be about any refugee in the world.' Anyone can become a refugee very quickly. Earthquakes, wars, natural catastrophes.”

She shrugs off my suggestion that her films might motivate people to action. “To action, you know — to what action? I don't think anybody will move, but I'd like to move them a little bit from the inside. I think the more documentaries are done on issues like this, the more people become... maybe more human.”

We discuss the roles of civic society and government in tackling issues like child labour. “I personally believe everybody needs to have laws, like, 'If you do this, you're going to be punished,'” she says. “I'm not saying you need somebody like Hitler or anything like that,” she adds with a laugh, “but in Lebanon, definitely (child labour) is the government's responsibility.”

With over 40 documentaries and TV spots to her credit, including pieces for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Labour Organization, UNICEF and Al-Jazeera, Mansour should have plenty to be proud of. But she doesn’t want to discuss accomplishments.

“You should always be trying to do something better than the one you did before,” she says.