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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Country: Canada
Director: Omar Elhamy
Length: 28 mins
Synopsis: The car repair shop is their second home and their colleagues are like family. Everyone has their quirks and is accepted for the way they are. But then comes the bad news: they are soon to be squeezed out by a more lucrative new building project. How should they respond? How can they support each other? A buddy film about life’s little and larger transformations, about social class and solidarity, captured in sensitively telling images.
Director: Jumana Manna
Length: 64 mins
Synopsis: Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humour and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary, and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
Country: Syria, Germany
Director: Waref Abo Qaba
Length: 14 mins
Synopsis: Syrian history has been multicultural for centuries. This film is a voyage through Syrian culture until today’s insanity. It is a message of peace and hope for the Syrian people.
Country: Tunisia
Director: Ghassen Chraifa
Length: 7 mins
Synopsis: Life comes as a continuous race against time where everything is programmed in advance. Everything is tied up in a defined chronological order and we are just running to catch up. What would happen if we decide to take a break, if we feel how the present moment goes by?
Country: Morocco
Director: Abdessamad El Montassir
Length: 18 mins
Synopsis: While investigating on an event that profoundly changed the landscape of the Occidental Sahara, the filmmaker was faced with a silent entourage and parents who are haunted by this harsh socio-political history. He consequently focuses his attention on the landscape and plants in order to find elements that could answer and help to reconstruct this amnesia.
Country: Sudan
Director: Mohamed Kordofani
Length: 116 mins
Synopsis: Wracked by guilt after covering up a murder, Mona — a northern Sudanese retired singer in a tense marriage — tries to make amends by taking in the deceased’s southern Sudanese widow, Julia, and her son, Daniel, into her home.
Country: Palestine| 2022
Director: Ward Kayyal
Length: 18 mins
Synopsis: After recovering from his illness, Hamza returns to the forest to hunt a vicious lion that devours his memory.
Country: Egypt, United States
Director: Yasmin Moll
Length: 8 mins
Synopsis: A young girl flies back in time to her drowned homeland, guided by the songs and stories of her community
Country: Egypt
Director: Tarek El Sherbeny
Length: 12 mins
Synopsis: Hazem is distraught after his family secrets are made public when his mother decides to expose his late father’s sexual affairs during his funeral rites.
Country: Egypt
Director: Hady El Bagory
Length: 112 mins
Synopsis: Dr. Shukri Mokhtar is a renowned social psychology specialist, best known for his ability to answer the simplest questions, who decides to give one last lecture about the very simple question: how do we love?
Country: Egypt, Italy, Germany
Director: Amir Ramadan
Length: 18 mins
Synopsis: Fatou is a 23-year-old Italian girl of Senegalese origin. She lives in a suburb of Rome with her mother who would like to educate according to the rigid impositions of her culture of origin. But Fatou is looking for his own identity that combines her black Muslim being with Italian society, and unlike most of her peers, the social stigma of the immigrant is imprinted on her, that isolates her and reduces her friendships with other young children of foreigners. Her authentic passion and screen against prejudice is singing: music is what will never betray herself. After a night at the disco, Fatou is attacked by a thirty year old Italian who first insults her, and then tries to physically mistreat her. She confronts him with courage, opposes him, and finally manages to get on the bus that takes her back to her neighbourhood. In the short walk home, Fatou finds the strength to break the fear and humiliation with the song. An intimate nocturnal song in which Fatou tells herself, in the silence of the sleeping city, expressing his dreams as a girl, the hope of a radiant life that is perhaps already waiting for her. Fatou says she does not know love, if not in her mother’s feelings, she sings about the possibility of love, which means first of all to love oneself. And its poetic momentum becomes universal reflection on the sense of identity, so longed for and, for many, never really possessed.
Country: Syria, Sweden
Director: Yasser Kassab
Length: 20 mins
Synopsis: After talking about the end of the war in Syria and the start of the reconstruction phase, Yaser and his family find themselves compelled to deal with the transfer of graves from public parks in Aleppo. Thousands of kilometers separate Yaser from his parents in Aleppo. With what these two places carry of contradiction is reflecting the way they both deal with what happened.
Country: Canada
Director: Teyama Alkamli
Length: 20 mins
Synopsis: Tara, a queer Palestinian woman in her late 20s, attempts to suppress her internal emotional turbulence during a phone call with her best friend Sarab, with whom she is in love.
Country: Egypt, France, Qatar, Belgium
Director: Sameh Alaa
Length: 15 mins
Synopsis: After being separated for 82 days, Adam travels down a rough road to be reunited with the one he loves, whatever it takes.
Country: Yemen, Qatar, Russia
Director: Mariam Al Dhubhani
Length: 14 mins
Synopsis: In a rarely seen perspective of war, we follow Ali—a Yemeni soldier on tour in the temporary capital of Aden. Leaving his hopes, dreams, and education behind to join the military, Ali dutifully sits at his checkpoint, performing a mundane task that he is clearly overqualified to do. His story represents the majority of youth in the country, people who are unable to just ‘live’, but instead are forced to continually struggle to survive.
Country: Tunisia
Director: Slim Belhiba
Length: 14 mins
Synopsis: Tunisia, September 2013. There is only a fortnight left before the beginning of the school year. Uncle Salem, guardian of a small country school, begins rudimentary maintenance. Anxious about the state of the flag, he decides to go for a new one. Uncle Salem moves towards the city, where the reverberations of a betrayed revolution run through the minds and streets.