Country: Saudi Arabia
Director: Sara Mesfer
Length: 24 mins
Synopsis: In an engagement night, a denied request pushes two sisters to their edge. Salsabel, a 13 years old Saudi girl who fights to go to the grocery shop in a city where it’s socially unacceptable experiences hardship in her relationship with her older sister Wasan who the fear of the night’s darkness and refuses to go. Later that day, the two sisters find a way to their desires by burning the night.
FILMS//أفلام
The Girls Who Burned The Night//من يحرقن الليل
The Journey//الرحلة
Country: Iraq
Director: Mohamed Al-Daradji
Length: 82 mins
Synopsis: Sara enters Baghdad station with sinister intentions for its reopening ceremony. As she braces to commit an unthinkable act, her plans are drastically altered by an unwanted and awkward encounter with Salam, a self-assured and flirtatious salesman.
This film is not suitable for children.
The Last Queen//الملكة الأخيرة
Country: Algeria
Director: Damien Ounouri, Adila Bendimerad
Length: 110 mins
Synopsis: Insipired in the legendary Princess Zaphira, wife of the last King of Algiers Salim Toumi, and his fight to defend her community from pirate Barbarossa.
The Laughing Woo Woo
Country: United States
Director: Amir Youssef
Length: 17 mins
Synopsis: A proof-of-concept short film about Simsim – a lonesome Egyptian asylee in San Francisco with a wooingly contagious laugh, is battling his bizarre misfortunes to follow immigration procedures, and his only hope is his greedy lawyer Dale.
The Lebanese Burger Mafia//مافيا البرجر اللبنانية
Country: Canada, Lebanon
Director: Omar Mouallem
Length: 103 mins
Synopsis: The meaty saga of a rogue fast- food chain with mysterious origins, a cult following, and a secret pathway to the immigrant dream.
The Old Kalbelouz
Country: Algeria
Director: Imène Ayadi
Length: 10 mins
Synopsis:In Algiers, Ahmed 70 years old wakes up alone at home, he will start a day immersed in his thoughts. Who is he talking to?
The Old Oak
Country: 2023
Director: Ken Loach
Length: 113 mins
Synopsis: A pub landlord in a previously thriving mining community struggles to hold onto his pub. Meanwhile, tensions rise in the town when Syrian refugees are placed in the empty houses in the community.
The Poem We Sang//غنينا قصيدة
Country: Palestine, Canada, Jordan
Director: Annie Sakkab
Length: 20 mins
Synopsis: The Poem We Sang is a 20-minute, colour and black and white, experimental documentary that meditates on love and longing – the love of one’s family and the longing for one’s home, contemplated through overcoming the trauma of loss of family home and of forced migration, transforming lifelong regrets into a healing journey of creative catharsis and bearing witness.
The Poet and the Swan//الشاعر و البجعة
Country: Syria
Director: Ayham Jabr
Length: 41 mins
Synopsis: In a parallel and imagined world, a revolution has triumphed. A revolution based and fuelled by hatred and ignorance, in all countries of Asia, the time of Asyatopia. The dystopian short film is inspired by the writings of George Orwell and the poems of Nizar Qabbani. The events of the film take place in a country in Asia after the victory of a black revolution – in it, thinking and feeling was forbidden, war ragged on, permanent revolutionary censorship, manipulation of the masses … and lies. The life of the film’s protagonist is turned upside down … after he receives a paper written on it one word … a word that can cause him to disappear from the face of the world.
The Poetess//الشاعرة
Country: Germany
Director: Stefanie Brockhaus & Andreas Wolff
Length: 89 mins
Synopsis: Imagine a European TV channel attracting millions of viewers across countries with poetry readings. This is exactly what Abu Dhabi TV has managed to do for a decade with the show Million’s Poet. After accusing extremists on stage, Hissa Hilal, a Saudi woman, who was shrouded in an abaya – a black cloak – and a niqab, received death threats. And the attention of the West. The German filmmaker Stefanie Brockhaus saw a picture of her in the New York Times and travelled with Andy Wolff to Abu Dhabi a few days later to accompany Hilal at the finals of Million’s Poet.
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry//البحر الأحمر يبكي
Country: Jordan
Director: Faris Alrjoob
Length: 21 mins
Synopsis: Wandering through desolate bars, hotels, and offices, Ida attempts to feel Ismail’s presence one last time and to say goodbye.
The Return of Osiris//عودة اوزيريس
Country: Palestine
Director: Essa Grayeb
Length: 14 mins
Synopsis: On June 9, 1967, Egyptian President at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser appeared on television and radio to inform the Egyptian citizens of their country’s defeat. During the speech, he also announced his resignation. For many, Nasser’s speech was the first hint at the full scope of loss and disillusionment with the pan-Arab vision he led. The film weaves together dozens of scenes that feature the speech from Egyptian films and television series produced between 1972-2016. The found footage excerpts were edited to reconstruct Nasser’s speech of resignation according to the original text.
The Skates//Les Patins
Country: Canada
Director: Halima Ouardiri
Length: 13 mins
Synopsis: Mina loves to skate. Today, her father, recently divorced from her mother, accompanies her to her first figure skating lesson. An ordinary day if something hadn’t happened to the skates.
The Soil and the Sea//بحر و تراب
Country: Lebanon
Director: Daniele Rugo
Length: 74 mins
Synopsis: In Lebanon there are more than 100 untouched mass graves dating back from the Civil War, and thousands of families awaiting a missing relative or at least a bone to bury The Soil and the Sea unveils the violence lying beneath a garden, a school, a cafe, a hotel, and other unremarkable landscapes.
The Song of Sin//نشيد الخطيئة
Country: France
Director: Khalid Maadour
Length: 15 mins
Synopsis: The Song of Sin retraces the story of Sufunis and Youba, couple of Imediazens, a tribe of the rif located in the North East of Morocco. Poets and musicians, heirs to an ancestral art, they are ostracized by a society that is looking for itself. Much more than a love story, the story of a people, is played out on these windswept highlands, between resignation and combat.
The Sparrow//العصفور
Countries: Palestine, Austria
Director: Nasri Hajaj
Length: 14 mins
Synopsis: Based on true stories, The Sparrow, tells a story of life under dictatorship which can be anywhere and anytime. An Arab intellectual has been imprisoned for many years. One night while serving his unlimited period he is asked by the prison warden to tell stories to a five-year-old child in one of the neighboring cells. There he meets the mother of the child, born in prison. Meant to be a perfidious torture by the prison warden, he faces the challenge of how to tell a story to a child that has never seen the sun.
The Strangers’ Case
Country: Jordan
Director: Brandt Andersen
Length: 103 mins
Synopsis: Tragedy strikes a Syrian family in Aleppo, starting a chain reaction of events involving five different families in four different countries.
The Tedious Tour of M//جولة ميم المملة
Country: Egypt
Director: Hend Bakr
Length: 76 mins
Synopsis: A peanuts street vendor who turned into one of the stars of the modern history of Egyptian literature in the sixties, comes back to his hometown and cocoons for 30 years. He claims that he was doomed to stop writing forever.
The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni//اختفاءات سعاد حسني الثلاثة
Country: Lebanon, France
Director: Rania Stephan
Length: 70 mins
Synopsis: The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni is a rapturous elegy to a rich and versatile era of film production in Egypt which has lapsed today, through the work of one of its most revered actress and star: Soad Hosni, who from the early 1960 into the 90s, embodied the modern Arab woman in her complexity and paradoxes.
The Tomb//الضريح
Country: Sudan
Director: Eltayeb Mahdi
Length: 17 mins
Synopsis: The Tomb tells the story of a man who claims to be able to heal people.