Country: Lebanon
Director: Oscar Debs
Length: 20 mins
Synopsis: A family rumor about an Egypt-based star’s kinship to the Debs family in El-Mina, Tripoli, led to revisiting the history of a specific deserted cinema theatre there and the family of its manager.
FILMS//أفلام
Cine-Ruins
Clench My Fists
Country: United States
Director: Sarah Trad
Length: 6 mins
Synopsis: A found-footage collage video that explores the process of growing up in an Arab family deeply affected by death and grief. “Clench My Fists” is part of a series of work focusing on not only decolonizing Imperialist Western understandings of the Middle East but to also show the beauty of the artist’s heritage, outside the context of her family.
CloseCall
Country: Egypt, United States
Director: Amr El-Bayoumi, Matt Tsymbal
Length: 9 mins
Synopsis: An Egyptian-American businessman arrives in New York City to salvage a transaction that has his career hanging in the balance. Will a detour to the 9/11 Memorial jeopardize the deal?
Compressed//مضغوط
Country: Syria, France
Director: Ali Dawwa
Length: 8 mins
Synopsis: Compressed highlights the work of Khaled Dawwa, a Syrian artist, who was in one of the Syrian regime’s prisons. He met many young people in the prison, their only guilt and the great crime was that they had dreamed of, and asked for a better future. Released from prison, Khaled, now lives in France. He considers himself a hope for all those who are still in prison and expresses their voice and suffering through his sculptures. For Khaled, love and revolution are inseparable.
Conditional Desire//تصعيد
Country: Tunisia
Director: Houcem Slouli
Length: 15 mins
Synopsis: In a conformist society, Ahmed and Salma, marry for convenience to pursue their passions with secret lovers.
Conversations with an Actress
Country: Lebanon
Director: Estephan Khattar
Length: 13 mins
Synopsis: Throughout two consecutive summers, a director was documenting his conversations with an actress about Beirut, love, failure, and immigration without her knowing that her private chats and voice notes have been transformed into a film.
Costa Brava, Lebanon
Country: Lebanon
Director: Mounia Akl
Length: 106 mins
Synopsis: Members of a family quit the polluted, rubbish-strewn city of Beirut for an idyllic mountain home. However, their dreams of a utopian existence are shattered by the construction of a landfill on the boundary of their land.
Crocodile Tears//تمساح
Country: Egypt, Saudi Arabia
Director: Khaled Moeit
Length: 16 mins
Synopsis: On a road that is overshadowed by its roamers, a Taxi driver takes off with his cousin who wants to deliver money to another city.
Dajla: Cinema and Oblivion
Country: Spain
Director: Arturo Dueñas
Length: 15 mins
Synopsis: The rocky desert in southwestern Algeria is the temporary home of about 150,000 refugees from Western Sahara. Goats grazing or the opening of a beauty salon are among the many scenes of everyday life of people who are eagerly awaiting the beginning of the film festival. The observational documentary captures the unwavering love of film in a place that the world has forgotten.
Don’t Forget The Water//لا تنسى التسمية
Country: Canada
Director: Christina Hajjar
Length: 5 mins
Synopsis: A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge.
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
Country: Yemen, Qatar, United States, Netherlands
Director: Shaima Al Tamimi
Length: 9 mins
Synopsis: Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a heartfelt introspective letter to my deceased grandfather. The letter questions the continuous pattern of movement amongst Yemenis in diaspora. The film fuses archival photographs, sourced footage, parallax animation, abstract videos to create an audio visual body of work that calls attention to the collective feeling of statelessness and sense of being felt by Yemeni (or non-Yemeni) migrants.
Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo
Country: Canada
Director: Marya Zarif, André Kadi
Length: 72 mins
Synopsis: Forced to leave Syria because of the war, Dounia and her grandparents go in search of a new safe haven.
Edris//إدريس
Country: Egypt
Director: Amir El-Shenawy
Length: 17 mins
Synopsis: A 17-year-old Eritrean boy fled the war in his country to settle in Egypt, where he dreams to overcome the barriers and get accepted into the Egyptian society so he could get a chance to become a promising professional football player and help his family back home. The documentary tells a simple story that sheds light on the status of African migrants and refugees in Egypt today.
Elektra, My Love (Elektra, Ya Gharami)
Country: Lebanon, Germany
Director: Hisham Bizri
Length: 89 mins
Synopsis: A kammerspiel-film set in the moody, cavernous ruin of the Piccadilly Theater, Beirut’s extravagant art palace destroyed after the Lebanese Civil War.
Fear: Audibly//الخوف: صوتيا
Countries: Saudi Arabia
Director: Mahaa El Saati
Length: 22 mins
Synopsis: Anxious that Judgment Day is on the horizon, Amal keenly awaits to hear the Trumpet of Doom; One day, unexpected guests invade her office space to confirm her fears.
Festina Lente
Country: Canada
Director: Baya Medhaffar
Length: 21 mins
Synopsis: Combining two contradictory terms in a single phrase is called an oxymoron. Circumventing the obvious, shaking up the logic, proceeding in gusts, claiming the impossible, such is the method that Baya Medhaffar has chosen and, adopting an ancient motto, she makes it clear right from the title: “Make haste slowly”. There are several explanations for this speed proclaimed yet slowed all at once. Her film is mostly made of edited, assembled images from other films; thus, all the emergencies from other works reach a climax here, but as they overlap, they also call for their patient and detailed examination. The dishevelled editing is combined to a superimposition technique that makes scales collide, that associate separated figures and backgrounds, and that ties together in the same frame seemingly unrelated dynamics and lines of forces.
Fiasco//فياسكو
Country: Lebanon, Netherlands
Director: Nicolas Khoury
Length: 70 mins
Synopsis: The strong and, at time, dysfunctional relationship that binds Nicolas to his family after the death of his father.
Fighters
Country: France
Director: Malika Hadjal
Length: 20 mins
Synopsis: Emma, a woman of 35 years old, beaten by her abusive husband, escapes her house during the night with her 5 years old daughter, CHLOE.
First Sky//السماء الأولى
Country: Egypt
Director: Lena Naassana
Length: 19 mins
Synopsis: A young skater from Alexandria receives a Super 8 camera from his older brother who has recently emigrated. Over the course of a long summer by the sea, he begins to use the camera in the hopes of reconnecting with his brother.
Flesh Out//Il Corpo Della Sposa
Country: Italy
Director: Michela Occhipinti
Length: 94 mins
Synopsis: Verida is due to marry in three months; the marriage has been arranged by her loving parents. According to a tradition still practiced in Mauritania that adheres to accepted standards of beauty, she has to gain weight to attain the kind of well-rounded, fuller figure that will appeal to her future husband. Three months before her marriage, her routine unfolds quietly and steadily as she sets about consuming no fewer than six meals per day and regularly weighing herself to assess her progress. An obedient daughter, she does not for one moment question the goal of twenty kilos her mother has set for her; nor does she put up much resistance to being woken up in the middle of the night to eat one more bowl of milk and another of couscous. But the process gets harder as it progresses and this puts an increasing strain on her, both physically and emotionally. Verida, who has in the meantime attracted the attentions of another man, begins to ask herself if this is what she really wants. Based on actual events, Michela Occhipinti’s feature debut is a meticulous and gentle observation of the polarising tensions that permeate the modern female experience in twenty-first century Mauritania.