Arabic

Synopsis:
Rabih, a young blind man, lives in a small village in Lebanon. He sings in a choir and edits Braille documents for an income. His life unravels when he tries to apply for a passport and discovers that his identification card, which he has carried his entire life, is a forgery. Traveling across rural Lebanon in search of a record of his own birth, he meets people on the far fringes of society who tell their own stories, open further questions and give Rabih minor clues about his true identity. Descending into a void at the heart of his existence, Rabih encounters a nation incapable of telling his or its own narrative.Read More »

In Nazareth, an old couple lives wearily to the rhythm of the daily routine. On the other side of the border, in Ramallah, their son Tarek wishes to remain an eternal bachelor, their daughter is about to give birth while her husband lands a movie role and the grandmother loses her head … Between check-points and dreams, frivolity and politics, some want to leave, others want to stay but all have personal affairs to resolve.Read More »

Quote:
In 2007, the human rights organisation B’tselem launched a project consisting of providing video cameras and training to Palestinian volunteers in the West Bank to document their lives under Israeli occupation. Made up of many short films, “Of Land and Bread” is a film of painful eloquence.

Latitudes Section – Visions du Réel 2020Read More »

Quote:
A simple peasant discovers that Al-Iqtaa (feudalism) authority is an extension of the colonial authority, when his land is taken from him. He is imprisoned, beaten and insulted by the gendarme. He escapes from the prison to go to the mountains with a rifle. There, he begins his bloody struggle with the gendarme and Al-Iqtaa bands. At that time, the conditions for revolution were not riped yet. Peasants were with him in soul, but their will was not theirs. So, he remains alone, his revolution is that of one person, and so it ends as it shall be.Read More »

Focuses on 13-year-old Mohammed Hejazi, a second-grade dropout the filmmaker encountered at the Karni crossing in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian children often gather to throw stones.Read More »

Director Mohanad Yaqubi draws on recently-discovered and archival found footage to explore the tumultuous history of Palestine and Palestinian filmmaking in this timely and insightful documentary.Read More »

Filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon, shortly before the infamous massacre of 1982, this Syrian documentary’s principle reference is dreams, and not lived reality. It plays in this way on a double register, whereby women, children, the elderly, and combatants each recall the reality of their everyday, transposed eerily into their dreams, nightmares and premonitions.Read More »

Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, forever trying to outrun the latest scandal she’s caught up in. When Selim discovers the truth about their past, his mother vows to make a fresh start. In Tangier, new opportunities promise the legitimacy they each crave, but not without pushing the volatile mother-son relationship to the breaking point. The Damned Don’t Cry combines melodrama and neorealism to tell the story of a mother-son relationship on the fringes, observing the effects of oppression – both economic and affective – in a cut-throat world. Borrowing its title from a 1950s Joan Crawford melodrama, The Damned Don’t Cry employs non-professional actors for its two main actors and almost the entire cast. In his second feature which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa manages to avoid pastiche while ‘readily embracing some of the formal elements of melodrama’ as he takes his inspiration from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Le notti di Cabiria.Read More »

A downtrodden father literally takes flight from the strictures of society in this supernaturally tinged, Tunisia-set odyssey.

3 nominations.Read More »