FILMS//أفلام

  • Foam (Écume)

    Foam (Écume)

    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.

  • Foragers//اليد الخضراء

    Foragers//اليد الخضراء

    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.

  • Four Acts for Syria//أربع فصول من أجل سوريا

    Four Acts for Syria//أربع فصول من أجل سوريا

    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.

  • Fragments

    Fragments

    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?

  • Galb’Echaouf//قلب الشوف

    Galb’Echaouf//قلب الشوف

    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.

  • Goodbye Julia//وداعاً جوليا

    Goodbye Julia//وداعاً جوليا

    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.

  • Hamza: Chasing the Ghost Chasing Me

    Hamza: Chasing the Ghost Chasing Me

    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.

  • Hanina//Homesick

    Hanina//Homesick

    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

  • He’s Dead Now//هو ميت ألان

    He’s Dead Now//هو ميت ألان

    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.

  • Hepta: The Last Lecture//هيبتا: المحاضرة الأخيرة

    Hepta: The Last Lecture//هيبتا: المحاضرة الأخيرة

    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?

  • I Am Fatou

    I Am Fatou

    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.

  • I Have Seen Nothing,​I Have Seen All//لم أرى شيئا, رأيت كل شيء

    I Have Seen Nothing,​I Have Seen All//لم أرى شيئا, رأيت كل شيء

    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.

  • I Never Promised You A Jasmine Garden//لم أعدك بالياسمين

    I Never Promised You A Jasmine Garden//لم أعدك بالياسمين

    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.

  • I’m Afraid To Forget Your Face//ستاشر

    I’m Afraid To Forget Your Face//ستاشر

    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.

  • In the Middle//في المنتصف

    In the Middle//في المنتصف

    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.

  • In Uncle Salem’s Country

    In Uncle Salem’s Country

    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.

  • Incurable

    Incurable

    Country: Iran
    Director: Bahare Nikjoo
    Length: 17 mins
    Synopsis: In a southern region of Iran, a girl has been lost. Her brother and her sister in law are looking for her, but there is a mystery behind this.

  • J’ai Le Cafard//بنت وردان

    J’ai Le Cafard//بنت وردان

    Country: Kuwait
    Director: Maysaa Almumin
    Length: 14 mins
    Synopsis: A woman in a downhearted mood struggles to keep up appearances in front of her chirpy and driven office colleagues. An encounter with a dying cockroach in the office toilet develops into an absurd friendship, becoming the comforting companionship she needs until she realizes its destructive effects on her life.

  • Jafar Panahi’s Taxi//تاکسی

    Jafar Panahi’s Taxi//تاکسی

    Country: Iran
    Director: Jafar Panahi
    Length: 82 mins
    Synopsis: Taxi uses a clever conceit to offer a window not only into the day-to-day lives of taxi drivers and other workers in Tehran, but also into the materialities of being a working filmmaker in Iran.

  • Jardins Paradise

    Jardins Paradise

    Country: Canada
    Director: Yza Nouiga
    Length: 6 mins
    Synopsis: Garden of Eden, jardin à la française, English, Zen, Bahai, Arab-Islamic: Gardens reflect history, culture and heritage. They are some of the rare places where intimacy, gatherings, fun and religion coexist. And, what if Paradise was nothing more than a green parking lot designed to suit each and everyone’s own preferences?