2022 FESTIVAL

FILM GUIDE

5:1

2021 | 8mins | Canada | French
Filmmaker Ben-Saud takes us into her family home, where she was confined with her parents and adult brother and sister […]

Abu Saddam

2021 | 89mins | Egypt | Arabic
Experienced truck driver Abu Saddam gets a transportation mission on the North Coast road after he stopped working for years. […]

An Evening with Laila

2021 | 10mins | Kuwait | Arabic
A short documentary about the life and true story of Laila Abdulaziz, a pioneer of music in the Arabian Gulf […]

Blooming Dalia

2021 | 24mins | France | French
Dalia (25), a french ex-reality TV starlet, is at her lowest point. Depressed and overweight, she tries to reconnect with […]

CloseCall

2021 | 9mins | Egypt, United States
An Egyptian-American businessman arrives in New York City to salvage a transaction that has his career hanging in the balance. […]

Dajla: Cinema and Oblivion

2020 | 15mins | Spain | English, Spanish
The rocky desert in southwestern Algeria is the temporary home of about 150,000 refugees from Western Sahara. Goats grazing or […]

Elektra, My Love (Elektra, Ya Gharami)

2021 | 89mins | Lebanon, Germany | Arabic
A kammerspiel-film set in the moody, cavernous ruin of the Piccadilly Theater, Beirut’s extravagant art palace destroyed after the Lebanese […]

Galb’Echaouf

2021 | 18mins | Morocco | Arabic
While investigating on an event that profoundly changed the landscape of the Occidental Sahara, the filmmaker was faced with a […]

Joe Buffalo

2021 | 16mins | Canada | English
Joe Buffalo, an Indigenous skateboard legend and Indian Residential School survivor, must face his inner demons to realize his dream […]

Mariam

2020 | 5mins | Palestine | Arabic, English
After losing her precious paradise, Mariam undergoes a journey through her roots and history to find culture and continuity.

Osha

2021 | 15mins | United Arab Emirates | Arabic
This short documentary follows a mother (Aysha) and daughter (Osha) as they travel through the desert hunting with falcons, the […]

Searching for Amal

2020 | 30mins | Egypt | Arabic
A grandson opens up old family photos to realize that there was always a picture of a girl hanging on […]

Strangers After Midnight

2021 | 22mins | Syria | Arabic
Moments that unfolded late one night in the life of four Syrian refugees in Paris.

The Laughing Woo Woo

2022 | 17mins | United States | Arabic, English
A proof-of-concept short film about Simsim – a lonesome Egyptian asylee in San Francisco with a wooingly contagious laugh, is […]

Under The Concrete

2020 | 79mins | Lebanon | Arabic
Beirut, Lebanon 2017. As the country trembles a man decides to attempt to break the world record of depth in […]

Warsha

2022 | 16mins | Lebanon | Arabic
A Syrian migrant working as a crane operator in Beirut volunteers to cover a shift on one of the most […]

A Second Life

2021 | 92mins | Tunisia | English
Gadeha (12) happens one day to be the victim of a car accident. He undergoes surgery. Penniless, his mother, Borkana, […]

Algerian Chronicles

2021 | 74mins | France | Arabic, French
Summer 2019, Zak wanders around the streets of Alger and dives into the Hirak, a series of protests happening in […]

Ana Wa Enti (Me and You)

2020 | 17mins | United States | Arabic
33-year-old Amira struggles to find her place in between her Arab and American identities while living with and navigating her […]

Brown Bread & Apricots

2020 | 8mins | Canada, Jordan | Arabic
In the absence of his parents, an unruly teenager is presented with a crucial test of character devised by his […]

Conversations with an Actress

2022 | 13mins | Lebanon | Arabic, English, French
Throughout two consecutive summers, a director was documenting his conversations with an actress about Beirut, love, failure, and immigration without […]

Don’t Forget The Water

2021 | 5mins | Canada | Arabic
A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions […]

Festina Lente

2021 | 21mins | Canada | Arabic, English, French
Combining two contradictory terms in a single phrase is called an oxymoron. Circumventing the obvious, shaking up the logic, proceeding […]

Incurable

2021 | 17mins | Iran | Arabic
In a southern region of Iran, a girl has been lost. Her brother and her sister in law are looking […]

Khamsin

2019 | 66mins | France | English, French
Lebanon today. The traces of the civil war are all too tangible as government corruption becomes unbearable. In a country […]

Nightfall

2021 | 26mins | France | Arabic
On the 13th of July 2011, during a demonstration against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the Syrian authorities […]

Roadblock

2020 | 16mins | France, Lebanon | French
Beirut 2019 – During the Revolution. On her way back from a protest, Farah, a young Lebanese woman and her […]

Son Of The Streets

2020 | 33mins | Palestine | Arabic
The film depicts the daily life of Khodor, a 13-year-old orphan whose relatives struggle to get him an ID card […]

Tala’Vision

2021 | 27mins | Germany, Jordan | Arabic
Trapped in a war ridden reality, with the hope of one day playing in the neighborhood’s football field, 8 year […]

The Song of Sin

2021 | 15mins | France | Arabic
The Song of Sin retraces the story of Sufunis and Youba, couple of Imediazens, a tribe of the rif located […]

Virtual Voice

2021 | 7mins | Sudan | English
This is a satirical review of our times. Suzi doll is an ego-warrior. My online avatar, marching to the algorithms […]

With Strings Attached

2021 | 3mins | United Kingdom | Arabic
The importance of women in this world is often neglected. This narrative stop-motion film explores the complexities of a relationship […]

A Toi

2021 | 11mins | Lebanon | English
A 12 year old boy develops a spiritual relationship with his dead grandpa.

Alia

2022 | 26mins | France | French
Ali, a young Moroccan emigrant, is torn between the conservative environment of his family and his passion for the cabaret […]

Aïcha’s Dress

2021 | 28mins | Tunisia | Arabic
Saber, a young 14-year-old who lives in precariousness, manages as best he can to provide for himself and his sick […]

Cine-Ruins

2021 | 20mins | Lebanon | Arabic
A family rumor about an Egypt-based star’s kinship to the Debs family in El-Mina, Tripoli, led to revisiting the history […]

Costa Brava, Lebanon

2022 | 106mins | Lebanon | Arabic
Members of a family quit the polluted, rubbish-strewn city of Beirut for an idyllic mountain home. However, their dreams of […]

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

2021 | 9mins | Yemen, Qatar, United States, Netherlands | Arabic, English
Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a heartfelt introspective letter to my deceased grandfather. The letter questions the continuous pattern of […]

Fighters

2020 | 20mins | France | French
Emma, a woman of 35 years old, beaten by her abusive husband, escapes her house during the night with her […]

J’ai Le Cafard

2020 | 14mins | Kuwait | Arabic
A woman in a downhearted mood struggles to keep up appearances in front of her chirpy and driven office colleagues. […]

Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow

2017 | 23mins | Lebanon, Germany | Arabic
A young filmmaker investigates the legend of Manivelle, an automaton gifted to Lebanon in 1945 that still haunts an abandoned […]

Nur El Qulub

2021 | 8mins | Canada | Arabic
Nur Al Qulub is an exploration of the spiritual dimension of shadow and light. Drawing from the director’s experiences as […]

Sandjak

2021 | 8mins | Lebanon | Armenian
Navigating three types of images, shot in three different periods, the film explores the poetics of haunting through compositions of […]

State of Agitation

2020 | 100mins | Lebanon | Arabic
Living in Beirut, a highly enthusiastic filmmaker is in a state of hyper inspiration characterized by an overfiow of contrasting […]

Tender Threads

2021 | 24mins | Morocco | Arabic
The routine of daily life between Radia and her mother generates an awful discomfort and becomes a major obstacle to […]

The Way Back

2020 | 18mins | Libya | Arabic
Tawergha is a village in the middle of northern Libya, during the events of the Libyan revolution on February 17, […]

Visions of Basra

2021 | 5mins | Canada | Arabic
Visions of Basra explores my mother’s fragmented memories of her homeland by exploring her photographs, colours and words. Each moving […]

You Resemble Me

2021 | 90mins | France, Egypt, United States | Arabic, French
When the bond is broken between two sisters, a little girl transforms into someone new in the name of belonging […]